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THE 



# 


WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


BY 

GRACE AGUILAR, 

* t 

AUTHOR OF “ WOMAN’S FRIENDSHIP,” “MOTHER’S RECOMPENSE.” “ VAU£ OF 
CEDARS,” ETC. 


TWO VOLUMES IN ONE. 


V. NEW YORK : 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 

1, 8, u« 5 BOND STEEET. 

1888 . 


Y 




















SOURCE UNKNOWN 

FEB 1 9 1945 





C. „ C 


















CONTESTS OF VOLUME 1 


n oa 

IBTUC DUCl'IOK 7 

FIRST PERIOD. 

WIVES OF THE PATRIARCHS. 

CHAPTER I. 

Eve , 19 

CHAPTER II. 

Saran .44 

CHAPTER III. 

Rebekah 76 

CHAPTER IV. 

Leah and Rachel .107 

SECOND PERIOD. 

THE EXODUS AND THE LAW. 

CHAPTER I. 

Egyptian Captivity, and Jochebed .... 134 

CHAPTER II. 

The Exodus. — Mothers of Israel 150 

CHAPTER III. 

Laws for Wives in Israel 158 

CHAPTER IV. 

Laws for Widows and Daughters in Israel . . . .173 

CHAPTER V. 

# 

M»id Servants m Israel, and Suodry other Laws . 


190 


* 


CONTENTS 


VI 


r ifji 

THIRD PERIOD. 

BETWEEN THE DELIVERY OF THE LAW, AND THE MONARCHY • 


Miriam 

CHAPTER I. 

• • • • • 

• • 

. 203 

Tabernacle Workers.- 

CHAPTER II. 

—Caleb’s Daughter 

/ 

t % 9 

. 211 

Deborah 

CHAPTER III. 

• 

• • • • 

9 9 9 

. 218 

Wife of Manoah 

% 

CHAPTER IV. 

• • • • 

9 9 9 

. 227 

Naomi 

CHAPTER V. 

« • • • 

• 99 

. 236 

Hannah . 

7HATTFJ* 

• T * • 

9 9 

854 


,/ 




\ 


\ 




/ 




THE 


WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


INTRODUCTION. 

Among the many valuable works relative to woman’s capa 
bilities, influence, and mission, which in the present age are sc 
continually appearing, one still seems wanting. The field has, 
indeed, been entered ; detached notices of the women of Israel 
the female biography of Scripture, have often formed interesting 
portions of those works, where woman is the subject ; but all the 
fruit has not been gathered : much yet remains, which, thrown 
together, would form a history as instructive as interesting, as 
full of warning as example, and tending to lead our female 
youth to the sacred volume, not only as their guide to duty, 
their support in toil, their comfort in affliction, but as a true 
and perfect mirror of themselves. 

To desert the Bible for its commentators ; never to peruse its 
pages without notes of explanation : to regard it as a work 
which of itself is incomprehensible, is, indeed, a practice as hurtfu’ 
as injudicious. Sent as a message of love to our own souls, 
as written and addressed, not to nations alone, but as the voice 
of God to individuals — whispering to each of us that which we 
most need ; thus it is we should first regard and venerate it 
This accomplished, works tending to elucidate its glorious and 
consoling truths, to make manifest its simple lessons of character, 
as well as precept; to bring yet closer to the youthful and 
aspiring heart, the poetry, the beauty, the eloquence, the 
appealing tenderness of its sacred pages, may prove of essential 
service. In this hope, to bring clearly before the women of 
Israel all that they owe to the word of God, all that it may stil 
be to them, the present task is undertaken. 


8 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


We are far from asserting that this has not been attempted, 
and for the larger portion of the sex, accomplished before 
Religion is the foundation and mainspring of every work which 
has been written for the use and improvement of woman. Female 
biographers of scripture have, we believe, often appeared ; though 
the characters of the Old Testament are so briefly and imperfectly 
sketched, compared to those of the New, that but little pleasure 
or improvement could be derived from their perusal. Yet still, 
with the writings of Sandford, Ellis, and Hamilton before us, 
each exhibiting its authoress so earnest, so eloquent in her cause, 
with “ woman’s mission” marked so simply, yet so forcibly, in 
the little volume of that name, has not woman of every race, and 
every creed, all sufficient to teach her her duty and herself ? 

We would say she had ; yet for the women of Israel some- 
thing still more is needed. The authors above mentioned are 
Christians themselves, and write for the Christian world. Edu- 
cation and nationality compel them to believe that “ Christianity 
is the sole source of female excellence.” To Christianity alone 
they owe their present station in the world : their influence, 
their equality with man, their spiritual provision in this life, 
and hopes of immortality in the next. Nay more, that the 
value and dignity of womari s character would never have been 
known, but for the religion of Jesus ; that pure, loving, self-deny- 
ing doctrines, were unknown to woman ; she knew not even her 
relation to the Eternal ; dared not look upon Him as her Father, 
Consoler, and Saviour, till the advent of Christianity. We grant 
that the Gentiles knew it not, till the Bible became more 
generally known, till the Eternal, in His infinite mercy, permitted 
a partial knowledge of Himself to spread over the world — alike 
to prepare the Gentile for that day, when we shall all know 
Him as He is, and to render the trial of His people’s faith and 
constancy yet more terribly severe. We feel neither anger nor 
uncharitableness towards those who would thus deny to Israel 
those very privileges which were ours, ages before they became 
theirs ; and which, in fact, have descended from us to them. 
Yet we cannot pass such assertion unanswered, lest from the 
very worth and popularity of those works in which it is promul- 
gated, the young and thoughtless daughter of Israel may 
believe it really has foundation, and look no further than the 
page she reads. 

How or whence originated the charge that the law of Moses 


INTRODUCTION. 


9 


Bank the Hebrew female to the lowest state of degradation, 
placed her on a level with slaves or heathens, and denied her all 
mental and spiritual enjoyment, we know not : yet certain it is 
that this most extraordinary and unfounded idea obtains credence 
even in this enlightened* age. The word of God at once proves 
its falsity ; for it is impossible to read the Mosaic law without 
the true and touching conviction, that the female Hebrew was 
even more an object of the tender and soothing care of the 
Eternal than the male. The thanksgiving in the Israelite 
morning prayer, on which so much stress is laid, as a proof how 
little woman is regarded, is but a false and foolish reasoning on 
the subject ; almost, in truth, too trivial for regard. 

The very first consequence of woman’s sin was to render her 
in physical and mental strength, inferior to man ; tc expose her 
to suffering more continued, and more acute ; to prevent her 
obtaining those honors and emoluments of which man thinks so 
much ; to restrain her path to a more lowly and domestic, 
though not a less hallowed sphere; and, all this considered, 
neither scorn towards the sex, nor too much haughtiness for 
themselves, actuate the thanksgiving which by our opponents is 
brought forward against us. It was but one of those blessings 
in which the pious Israelite thanks God for all things, demand- 
ing neither notice nor reproof. 

To the Gentile assertion that the Talmud has originated the 
above-mentioned blessing, and commanded or inculcated the 
moral and mental degradation of woman, we reply that even if 
t do, which we do not believe it does, its commands are wholly 
disregarded, and its abolishment is not needed to raise the 
Hebrew female to that station assigned her in the word of God, 
and which through many centuries she has been permitted, 
without reproof or question, to enjoy. The Eternal’s provision 
for her temporal and spiritual happiness is proved in His 
unalterable w r ord ; and therefore no Hebrew can believe that He 
would issue another law for her degradation and abasement. If, 
indeed, there are such laws, they must have been compiled at 
a time when persecution had so brutalized and lowered the 
intellect of man that he partook the savage barbarity of tho 
tations around him, and of the age in which he lived ; when 
the law of his God had, as a natural consequence, become 
obscured, and the Hebrew female shared the same rude and 
savage treatment which was the lot of all the lower classes of 


10 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


women in the feudal ages. The protection, the glory, the 
civilizing influence of chivalry extended, in its first establish- 
ment, but to the baronial classes. We see no proofs of the 
humanizing and elevating influence of Christianity, either on 
man or woman, till the reformation opened the Bible, the whole 
Bible, to the nations at large ; when civilization gradually 
followed. If, then, the situation of even Christian women was 
so uncertain, and but too often so degraded, for nearly fourteen 
centuries after the advent of Jesus, who his followers declare was 
the first to teach them their real position — was it very remark- 
able that the vilified and persecuted Hebrew should ha,e in a 
degree forgotten his nationality, his immortal and glorious 
heritage, and shared in the barbarity around him ? Granting 
for the moment that such was the case (but we by no means 
believe it was), if the degradation, mentally and morally, of the 
Hebrew female, ever did become part of the Jewish law, it was 
when man was equally degraded, and the blessed word of God 
hid from him. 

The situation of many of the Hebrews at the present day 
proves this. In but too many parts of the world the Israelites 
are still the subjects of scorn, hatred, and persecution : and 
their condition is, in consequence, the lowest and most awfully 
degraded in the scale of man. But it is not to woman that 
degradation and slavery are confined ; as, were it a portion 
of the law of Moses, would inevitably be the case. It is the 
consequence of cruelty, of abasement in social treatment ; yet 
even here, when mind, principle, honor, all seem overthrown 
from such brutalizing influence, the affections retain their power. 

Whatever of spiritual hope, of human privileges, the word of 
God bestows on man, and to which the mind, darkened and 
despairing from the horrors of persecution, may yet be open, 
are shared by the Hebrew wife, and imparted by the Hebrew 
mother. 

Were it a portion of the law of Moses to enslave and degrade 
us, how is it that we do not see this law adhered to and obeyed, 
as well as others claiming the same divine origin ? Neither 
Christianity nor civilization would alter or improve our condition, 
were it indeed such as it has been represented. The Hebrew 
ever loves, protects, and reverences his female relative ; and if, 
indeed, he do not — if he deny her all share in immortality, and 
in consequence, thinks she has no need of religion now, nor hope 


INTRODUCTION. 


11 


hereafter, it is because the remnants of barbarism, ignorance, 
and superstition remain, to have blinded both his spiritual and 
mental eye ; yet whatever he may be accused of believing, his 
acts deny the belief. Why is he so anxious that his wife and 
daughters should adhere to every law, attend to every precept 
which he believes the law of God ? If they have no soul, no 
portion in the world to come, it surely cannot signify how they 
act, or what they believe in this ? "Why are they blotted from 
the minds and hearts of their relatives, if, as it may sometimes 
happen, they intermarry with the stranger ? If they have no 
spiritual responsibility, no claim, no part in the law of God, why 
should they be blamed and shunned, if they desert it for another ? 
But it is idle to follow the argument farther. The charge is 
. either altogether false, or based on such contradictory and 
groundless report, as to render it of little consequence, save as it 
atfects us in the eyes of those who uphold, that till Christianity 
was promulgated woman knew not her own station either 
towards God or man. 

Simply to deny this assertion, to affirm, that instead of degrad- 
ing and enslaving, the Jewish law exalted, protected, and pro- 
vided for woman, teaching her to look up to God, not as a severe 
master and awful judge, but as her Father, her Defender, her 
Deliverer when oppressed, her Witness in times of false accusa- 
tion, her Consoler and Protector when fatherless, widowed — aye, 
as the tender and loving Sovereign, who spared the young bride 
the anguish of separation from her beloved : merely to affirm, 
that with such laws woman was equally a subject of divine love 
as she is now, would not avail us much. The women of Israel 
must themselves arise, and prove the truth of what we urge— ■ 
by their own conduct, their own belief, their own ever-acting 
and ever-influencing religion, prove without doubt or question 
that we need not Christianity to teach, us our mission — prove 
that our duties, our privileges, were assigned us from the very 
beginning of the world, confirmed by that law to which we still 
adhere, and will adhere for ever, and manifested by the whole 
history of the Bible. 

A new era is dawning for us. Persecution and intolerance 
have in so many lands ceased to predominate, that Israel may 
once more breathe in freedom ; the law need no longer bo 
preached in darkness, and obeyed in secret; the voice of man 
need no longer be the vehicle of instruction from father to son. 


12 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


mingling with it unconsciously human opinions, till those opi 
nions could scarcely be severed from the word of God, and by 
degrees so dimmed its lustre, as to render its comprehension an 
obscure and painful task. This need no longer be. The Bible 
may be perused in freedom ; the law may be publicly explained 
and preached to all who will attend. A spirit of inquiry, of 
patriotism, of earnestness in seeking to know the Lord, and obey 
Him according to His word, is springing up in lieu of the stag- 
nating darkness, the appalling indifference, which had reigned 
so long. Persecution never decreased our numbers. As the 
bush which burned without consuming, so was Israel in those 
blood-red ages of intolerance and butchery. In the very heart 
of the most catholic kingdom — amongst her senate, her warriors, 
her artisans — aye, even her monks and clergy — Judaism lurked » 
unconsumed by the fires ever burning round. The spirit was 
ever awake and active, ready to endure martyrdom, but not to 
forswear that God whose witnesses they were. Persecution was 
a crisis in our History ; prosperity the reaction ; and from that 
reaction the natural consequence was the gradual rise, growth, 
and influence of indifference. Indifference, however, has but its 
appointed time : and Israel is springing up once more the 
stronger, nobler, more spiritually enlightened, from his long and 
waveless sleep. Free to assert their right as immortal children 
of the living God, let not the women of Israel be backward in 
proving they, too, have a Rock of Strength, a Refuge of Love *, 
that they, too, have a station to uphold, and a “ mission ” to 
perform, not alone as daughters, wives, and mothers, but as 
witnesses of that faith which first raised, cherished, and defended 
them — witnesses of that God who has called them His, and who 
has so repeatedly sanctified the emotions peculiar to their sex, by 
graciously comparing the love he bears us, as yet deeper than a 
mother’s for her child, a wife’s for her husband, having compas- 
sion for his people, as on a “ woman forsaken and grieved in 
spirit.” “Can a woman forget her sucking oliild, that she 
should not have compassion on the son of her travail ; yea, 
she may forget, yet will I not forget thee.” “ As a mother 
comforteth her children, so will I comfort thee.” 

Were not these relations holy and sanctified in the sight of the 
I x>rd, would He use them as figurative of His long suffering love 1 
Many terms, similar to those above quoted, prove, without a 
shadow of doubt, the tender compassion with which He Regarded 


INTRODUCTION. 


13 


woman long before He used such terms to figure His compas- 
sionating love towards Israel, when sinfulness called forth His 
long averted wrath. 

Let us then endeavor to convince the nations of the high pri- 
vileges we enjoy, in common with our fathers, brothers, and 
husbands, as the first-born of the Lord, by the peculiar sanctity, 
spirituality, and inexpressible consolation of oui belief. Let us 
not, as women of Israel, be content with the mere performance 
of domestic, social, and individual duties, but vivify and lighten 
them by the rays of eternal love and immortal hope, which 
beam upon us from the pages of the Bible. A religion of love 
is indeed necessary to woman, yet more so than to man. Even 
in her happiest lot there must be a void in her heart, which ever- 
acting piety alone can fill ; and to her whose portion is to suffer, 
whose lot is lonely, O w r hat misery must be hers, unless she can 
lean upon her God, and draw from His word the blessed convic- 
tion that His love, His tenderness, are hers, far beyond the feeble 
conception of earth ; and that whatever she may endure, however 
unknown to or scorned by man, it is known to Him who smites 
but in love, and has mercy even while He smites. 

To realize this blessed conviction, the Bible must become 
indeed the book of life to the female descendants of that nation 
whose earliest history it so vividly records ; and be regarded, not 
as a merely political or religious history, but as the voice of God 
speaking to each individual, giving strength to the weak, en- 
couragement to the desponding, endurance to the patient, justice 
to the wronged, and consolation unspeakable as unmeasurable 
to the afflicted and the mourner. Do w r e need love ? We shall 
find innumerable verses telling us, that the Lord Himself pro- 
claimed His attribute as “ merciful and gracious, long-suffering, 
abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, 
forgiving iniquity and sin that “ as far as the Heaven is above 
the earth so great is His mercy, extending from everlasting to 
everlasting.” We have but to read those appeals of the Eternal 
to Israel, alike in Jeremiah and Isaiah, and many of the minor 
prophets — and if our hearts be not stone, they must melt before 
such compassionating love, such appealing tenderness, and feei 
we cannot be lonely, cannot be unloved, while such deep change- 
less love is ours. Do we need sympathy ? Shall we not find it 
in words similar to these, “ In all their afflictions He was afflicted, 
and the angel of His presence saved them ? In His love and i» 


14 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


His pity He redeemed them, and He bare them, and carried 
them all the days of old.” Do we need patience and strength 1 
Shall we not exercise it, when we have the precious promise, 
“ Wait on the Lord, be of good courage, and He shall strengthen 
thine heart ?” Shall we droop and grieve beneath the wrongs 
and false judgments of short-sighted man, when we are told the 
ways of God are not those of man — that He knoweth our frame 
and readeth our thoughts — that not a bodily or mental pang if 
ours which He does not know and compassionate— aye, and in 
His own good time will heal ! 

To throw together all those verses which confirm and prove 
the loving-tenderness borne towards us by the Eternal, would be 
an endless and a useless task. We can but point to that ever- 
flowing fount of healing waters, and assure those who have once 
really tasted, and will persevere in the heavenly draught, that it 
will never fail them, never change its properties, but each year 
sink deeper and deeper into their souls, till at length it becomes 
indeed all they need ; and they themselves will cling to it, 
despite of occasional doubt and darkness, inseparable from our 
souls while denizens of earth. 

Nor is it only the verses containing such gracious promises, 
which will yield us comfort and assistance. We may glean the 
glad tidings of Eternal Love from the biographies and narratives 
with which the sacred book abounds — there may be some meek 
and lowly spirits amongst the female youth of Israel, who would 
gladly clasp the strength and guidance which we proffer them 
from the Bible, could they believe that God, the great, the 
almighty, the tremendous and awful Being (as which they have 
perhaps been accustomed to regard Him), can have love and 
pity for themselves, or give comfort and aid to trials, which 
appear even too trivial to ask, or to excite the sympathy of man. 
We would lead them to look earnestly and believingly into the 
history of every woman in the Bible, and trace there the influence 
of God’s holy and compassionating love. We are not indeed 
placed as the women of Israel before their dispersion, or as the 
wives of the patriarchs before the law was given ; yet their God 
is our God. It was not to a race so perfect, so gifted, so hallowed, 
as to be free from all the present faults and failings of the sex 
that the Lord vouchsafed His love. No, it was to woman, even 
as she is now. The women of the Bible are but mirrors of out- 
selves. And if the Eternal, in His infinite mercy, extended love, 


INTRODUCTION. 


15 


compassion, forbearance, and forgiveness unto them, we in ay 
believe He extends them equally unto us, and draw comfort, and 
encouragement, and faith from the biographies we read. 

In a work entitled “The Women of Israel,” some apology 
perhaps, is necessary for commencing with the wives of the 
patriarchs, who may not lay claim to such holy appellation. Yet, 
as the chosen and beloved partners of those favored of God, from 
whom Israel traces his descent, and for the sake of whose faith 
and righteousness we were selected and chosen as a peculiar 
people, and the law given to be our guide through earth to 
heaven, we cannot consider our history complete without them ; 
more particularly as their lives are so intimately blended with 
their husbands ; and that in them, even yet more vividly than 
at a later period, we may trace the Lord’s dealings with His 
female children, and derive from them alike warning and support. 

Eve, indeed, may not have such national claim, but if we 
believe that her history, as every other part of Genesis, was 
penned by the same inspired law-giver — that Moses recorded 
only that which had been — we shall find much, indeed, to repay 
us for lingering a while on her character and life. To the 
scepticism, the cavils, the doubts, and (but too often unhappily) 
the direct unbelief in the Mosaic account of the first disobedience 
of man, we give no heed whatever. We must either believe in 
the Pentateuch or deny it. There can be no intermediate path. 
The whole must be true or none. It is not because much may 
appear obscure, or even contradictory in the sacred narrative, 
that we are to pronounce it false, or mystify and poetize it as an 
allegory. 

We are simply to believe, and endeavor to act on that belief. 
So much is there ever passing around us that we cannot solve ; 
our thoughts, in their furthest flight, are so soon checked, can 
penetrate so little into the wonders of man and nature, that it 
appears extraordinary how man can doubt and deny, because he 
cannot understand. In this case, however — the history of Eve 
— truth is so simple and clear, that we know not how it can 
supply such an endless fund of argument and doubt. To remove 
this groundless disbelief, to endeavor to render the narrative 
clear and simple to the female youth of Israel, and, even through 
Eve’s sad yet consoling history, to prove to them the deep love 
borne towards us from the very first of our creation by our 
gracious God, must be our apology, if apology be needed, foi 


26 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


commencing a work entitled “ The Women of Israel,” with our 
general mother. 

Beginning, then, from the very beginning, some degree of 
order is requisite in the arrangement of our subject. Our aim 
being to evince to the nations and to our own hearts, the 
privileges, alike temporal and eternal, which were ours from tho 
very commencement — to prove that we have no need of Christi- 
anity, or the examples of the females in the Gospel, to raise us 
to an equality with man — to demonstrate our duties and secure 
us consolation here or salvation hereafter — the word of God 
must be alike our ground-work and our guide. From the past 
history which that unerring guide presents, our present duties 
and responsibilities, and our future destiny, will alike be revealed. 
In a simple biography each life is a sufficient division ; but, 
with the exception of the wives of the patriarchs and one or two 
more, we have scarcely sufficient notice of individuals to illus- 
trate our design by regarding them separately. There appear, 
therefore, seven periods in the history of the women of Israel, 
which demand our attention. 

First Period — the Wives of the Patriarchs, including Eve, 
Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel. 

Second Period — the Exodus, and the Law considered as 
affecting the condition and establishing the privileges of women. 

Third Period — Women of Israel between the establishment 
of the Law and the authority of the Kings, comprising sketches 
of Miriam, Deborah, the wife of Manoah, Naomi, and Hannah. 

Fourth Period — Women of Israel during the continuation of 
the Kingdom, comprising, amongst other sketches, Michal, Abi- 
gail, the Shunammite, and Huldah. 

Fifth Period — Babylonish Captivity, including the life of 
Esther. 

Sixth Period — the War and Dispersion, and their effects on 
the condition and privileges of women in Israel. 

Seventh Period — Women of Israel in the Present time, as 
influenced by the history of the Past. 

For five of these periods, then, we perceive the word of God 
can be our only guide, and this at once marks our history as 
sacred, not profane. If, therefore, there should be parts which 
resemRe more a religious essay than female biography, wq 
reply, that to inculcate religion, the vital spirit of religion, is tha 
Bole intention of these pages. 


INTRODUCTION. 


17 


We wish to infuse the spirit of truth and patriotism, of 
nationality, and yet of universal love, in the hearts of the young 
daughters of Israel; and we know of no means more likely, 
under the divine blessing, to accomplish this, than to bring 
before them, as vividly and engagingly as we can, the never- 
ending love, the compassionating tenderness, the unchanging 
sympathy, alike in our joys and in our sorrows, manifested by 
the Eternal so touchingly and simply in the history of our 
female ancestors, — to lead them to know Him and love Him, 
not only through the repeated promises, but through the narra 
lives of His word, and to glory in those high privileges which 
as children, retainers and promulgators of His holy law, are 
ours, over and above every other nation, past or present, in 
the history of the world 1 












. 















FIRST PERIOD. 


THE WIVES OF THE PATRIARCHS. 


CHAPTER I. 

EYE. 

The last and mightiest work of creation was completed. Man, 
m his angelic and immortal beauty, stood erect and perfect, 
fresh from the hand of his Creator ; lord and possessor of the 
new formed world. Though formed of the dust, earth had not, 
as in the case of the inferior animals, brought him forth. Des- 
tined from the first to be made in the image of God, that is, to 
possess an emanation of the spiritual essence, and so become a 
living and immortal soul — the shrine of so glorious a possession 
was created by God himself. “ And God created him,” He did 
not “ call him forth.” 

For man, the beautiful creation already wrought, was not suffi- 
cient ; and “He planted a garden eastward in Eden, filling it 
with e ?ery tree that was pleasant for the sight, and good for 
food ” — animate and inanimate creation brought together by the 
Eternal in one beautiful and perfect whole. Nor was this all : 
endowed with capabilities of love, happiness, and wisdom, as 
much above the other animals as the angelic nature is to man. 
still he needed more for the perfection of his felicity ; and God 
in his infinite mercy provided for that want. 

“ It is not good for man to be alone,” the Eternal said ; “ I 
will make him a help meet for him.” And therefore woman 
was created, and brought unto man, who received her as the 
Eternal in His mercy had ordained, a being beloved above all 

19 


20 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


others, w hose gentler qualities and endearing sympathy should 
soften his rougher and prouder nature, and “ help ” him in all 
things “ meet” for an immortal being. 

The whole creation had had its origin in that Omnific Love 
which created to enjoy, — called out of darkness and chaos a 
world teeming with life and beauty, that innumerable sources of 
happiness might spring forth from what had before been naught ; 
but woman’s creation was a still greater manifestation of love 
than all which had gone before it. She was created, not only 
to feel happiness herself, but to make it for others ; and if that 
was the design of her existence in Eden, how deeply should we 
feel the solemn truth, that it is equally so now, and that woman 
has a higher and holier mission than the mere pursuit of 
pleasure and individual enjoyment ; that to flutter through lite 
without one serious thought or aim, without a dream beyond 
the present moment, without a feeling higher than temporal 
gratification, or an aspiration rising beyond this world, can never 
answer the purpose of her divine creation, or make her a help 
meet for man. Nor is it to wives only this privilege is accorded. 
Mother or sister, each has equally her appointed dutv — to 
endeavor so to help and influence man, that her more spiritual 
and unselfish nature shall gradually be infused into him, and, 
raising him above mere worldly thought and sensual pleasures, 
compel him to feel that it is not indeed “good for man to be 
alone,” but that woman may still fulfil the office of help and 
love for which alone she was created. 

Although the Mosaic record of man’s residence in Paradise is 
mournfully brief, we have sufficient scriptural authority fer lin- 
gering a little while on Eve’s innocent career. Placed in a 
garden with every capability of felicity within herself, — nature, 
meditation, commune with the Almighty in thanksgiving, or 
with Him direct, through the Voice which revealed the invisible 
presence, the sweet blessed intercourse of kindred spirits, spring- 
ing from the love she bore to and received from her husband, — * 
simple and imperfect as such sources of enjoyment may appear, 
they were more exquisite, more perfect, than we car dream of 
now. 

The spirit which God had breathed within man when he 
necame a living soul, was the likeness or image of God in which 
made He man ;” and this spirit, or essence, enabled both 
Adam and Eve to commune in close and beatified intercourse 


PERIOD I. EYE. 


21 


ivith the glorified Creator whence that essence sprang. No sin 
could fling its dark shade between the soul and his God ; and 
so deaden spiritual joy. Naught of doubt could stagnate the 
love which must have been excited in their hearts towards their 
Father and their God. All around and within them bore such 
impress of His hand, as to excite naught but gratitude and 
devotion. If even now, when once we have realized the love of 
God and submission to His will — when once we can so put our 
trust in Him as to give Him “ all our heart,” and come to Him 
in sorrow and in joy, convinced that He knows and loves us 
better than ourselves — we experience a peace, a blessedness no 
earthly tempests can remove ; how thrice blessed must have 
been the felicity of Eve ! 

Apart from the spirit which the Eternal gave to lead man to 
Himself, was the mind which opened to the creatures formed in 
His image the inexhaustible resources of wisdom, imagination, 
knowledge — all that could create that higher kind of happiness, 
which is synonymous with mental joy. Sources of what is now 
termed wisdom, that of books and man, were indeed unknown 
to our first parents ; nor did they need them. In the wonders 
of creation, the tree, the herb, the flower, the gushing rivers, 
the breezy winds ; nay, from the mighty form of the largest 
beast, to the structure of the tiniest leaf; the flow of the river to 
the globule of the dew, which watered the face of the whole 
ear*h, there was enough to excite and satisfy their mental powers ; 
enongh to excite emotions alike of wonder and adoration. 
Their commune with the angelic messengers of their benevolent 
Creator, their tidings of Heaven and its hosts, must have excited 
the highest and purest pleasure of imagination, and so diversified 
and lightened the mental exercises of wisdom, which the palpable 
and visible objects of creation so continually call forth. 

Nor was spiritual and mental felicity the only portion of Eve 
— the affections, the impulses of the heart, fresh from the 
creating Hand of Love, had full play — created, as the perfecting 
finish to man’s happiness, beholding him, the lord of all on which 
idle gazed — earth formed to yield him her fruits — water and air, 
to unite for his refreshment — every animal obeying his authority 
—instinctively feeling, too, the mighty power of his intellect, 
the strength of his mind and frame, the deepest reverence must 
have mingled with, and so perfected, her love. Nor would this 
icknowledgment tend to degrade woman in the scale o 1 


22 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


creation. Formed, like man, in the immortal likeness of the Lord 
he was his equal in his responsibilities towards God and in the care 
of his creatures ; endowed equally with man, but differently as 
to the nature of those endowments. His mission was to protect 
and guide and have dominion — hers to soothe, bless, persuade 
to right, and “ help” in all things “ meet” for immortal beings. 

The existence of Eve, then, in her innocence, was, in a word, 
an existence of love — love towards God and nature and man, 
which none of the infirmities of our present state could cloud or 
interrupt. Do we err, then, in saying that, even in the brief record 
of Scripture, we have sufficient authority for delineating the felicity 
of our first parents in Eden ? And will it not demonstrate 
appealingly to us, those pleasures which God Himself ordained, 
and which, even now, might so be cultivated as to bring us 
happiness, as infinitely superior to the amusements so called as 
innocence is to sin ? 

But beautiful as is this picture, we must turn from it to 
consider feelings and events of a sadly different nature. In the 
most conspicuous part of Paradise, the Eternal had called forth 
t;vo trees, differing in their magnificence, perhaps in the halo 
with which they may have been encircled, as peculiar witnesses 
of their Creator, from every other in the garden. They were 
the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. Of the first so 
little is known that we are justifiedln supposing the intention of 
its existence was frustrated by the disobedience of man ; a 
conjecture founded on the solemn fact, that as the Lord created 
not one thing in vain, that tree must also have had its use and 
.ntention, and from the words which follow at a later period, 
“ Lest man put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, 
and eat and live for ever,” we are quite authorized to suppose it 
possessed some qualities yet mightier than the Tree of Knowledge, 
with which its taste would have gifted man, had he not by 
rebellion frustrated the beneficent design of his Creator, and 
forfeited the privileges which might have been his own. 

Of the Tree of Knowledge, its intention and its uses, we have 
sufficient information. The Eternal knew the nature of the 
creatures He had formed ; that it was but an easy and slender 
trial of obedience and of love, if they had no temptation to rebel 
or disobey. Though subject to His sway, though deriving 
existence from His hand, and enjoying life and all its varied 
sources of felicity from the same infinite love, yet the Eternal, in 


PERIOD I. EVE. 


2 ? 


His wisdom and His justice, had endowed them with the power 
of free-will ; of listening to and following, or struggling with and 
conquering, the seeds of corruption, which from their earthly 
shell were inherent, though as yet kept so completely under 
subjection from the divine and purifying nature of the soul, that, 
until he was tried, man himself was scarcely sensible of their 
existence. To have guarded him jealously from every temptation 
—to have surrounded him with naught but sources of pleasure 
and enjoyment, and so called forth only the grateful and adoring 
faculties of the spirit, was not according to that divine and 
perfect economy of love and justice which characterized the 
dealings of the Creator with his creatures. It was deeper, 
dearer love, to permit man to win his immortality, his eternal 
innocence, than to bestow them upon him unsought, and therefore 
little valued. They could be guilty of no crime in the world’s 
parlance, so termed. They were the sole possessors of the newly 
created earth : in daily commune with their creator, and therefore 
in neither idolatry, blasphemy, Sabbath-breaking, dishonoring of 
parents, murder, adultery, theft, false-witness, or covetousness, 
could they sin. God knew that all the crimes which might 
devastate the earth would spring from one alone, disobedience ; 
and therefore was it that His infinite wisdom ordained that the 
trial of man’s love, and faith, and virtue, should simply be, 
obedience to His will. 

“ And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, of every 
tree of the garden thou mayst freely eat ; but of the tree of 
the knowledge of the good and evil thou shalt not eat ; for in 
the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.” 
Whether this threatened chastisement was robed in mystery, or 
that Adam had beheld death in the inferior animals (for Holy 
Writ gives us no authority for believing that even they knew 
not death till after the fall), and so could have some idea of 
what he would become, even as a clod of the earth if he dis- 
obeyed, we may not here determine ; suffice it, that the Eternal 
was too merciful, too just, to threaten His creature with a chas- 
tisement for disobedience which he could not comprehend. 

Beautiful to look upon, and exquisite in its fragrance, we may 
imagine the Tree of Knowledge extending its rich foliage and 
tempting fruit in the most conspicuous part of the garden, no 
doubt frequently attracting the admiration of Adam and Evo, 
perhaps exciting wishes, which the spirit within them had as 


24 


1 H E WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


yet power to effectually banish, or entirely subdue. Alone, un^ 
protected by the sterner, firmer qualities of her husband, Eve 
had walked forth, secure in her own innocence, in the conscious- 
ness of love lingering within, and all around her ; — the young 
animals gambolling about her, calling forth her caresses and her 
smile — the little birds springing from tree to tree in joyous 
greeting, or nestling in her bosom without one touch of fear— 
the gorgeous flowers, in all their glowing robes and exquisite 
fragrance, clustering richly around her — the very buds seeming 
to look up into her sweet loving face, to reflect increase of 
beauty from the gaze, so may our fancy picture her, as she 
neared that tree under whose fair branches so much of misery 
lurked. Coiled at its root, or twisted in rainbow-colored folds 
arc und its trunk, lay the serpent, “ who was more subtle than 
any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.” And 
he said unto the woman, “ Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not 
eat of every tree in the garden ? And the woman said, We 
may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit 
of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, 
Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. 
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die, 
for God doth know, that in the day ye eat thereof, then your 
eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good 
and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good 
for food, and it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be de- 
sired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat ;* 
and she gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat. 

Such are the brief, yet emphatic words in which the inspired 
prophet of the Lord detailed those incidents on which the whole 
after-history of the world is founded — the mournful detail of 
that first sin, from which every other sprang, disobedience. 
Of the various speculations and opinions concerning the instru- 
mentality of the serpent we shall take no heed, save the humble 
endeavor to reconcile the ways of the Lord. He permitted the 
trial, but He commanded not the evil interposition of the subtlest 
of His creatures, the serpent, any more than He commanded 
the subtlety of Jacob in obtaining his father’s blessing. Both 
events were permitted to take place ; but the evil means of 
their accomplishment were not of the Lord, and consequently 
their agents were both subject to His displeasure, and con- 
demned to punishment and wrath. 


PERIOD 1. EVE. 


25 


In one brief hour, the whole nature of Eve w r as changed— 
the seeds of frailty, of whose very existence she had been 
scarcely conscious before, sprang up into influencing poison. 
Curiosity, presumption, the overweening trust in her own 
strength, the desire to act alone, independent of all control — to 
become greater, wiser, higher than the scale of being, than the 
station in which God’s love had placed her — discontent — scorn 
of the blessings which a moment before had seemed so precious, 
simply because imagination portrayed others more alluring — 
attracted by novelty, beauty, those idol shrines at which woman 
bo often sacrifices her better, her immortal self — such (and 
are they not the characteristics of woman, even as she is now ?) 
— such were the emotions excited by the wily tempter, through 
whose baneful influence she fell. Where, at that moment, was 
the voice of the spirit, warning her of the God she disobeyed ? 
Where the whisper of the mind, telling her that the sources of 
wisdom, of knowledge, already open, were the purest and the 
best ? Where the fond tones of the heart, urging her to seek 
the protection, the counsel, the support, of her earthly lord ? 
Hushed, drowned, in the wild tumult of new and terrible ex- 
citement of feelings, whose very novelty fascinated and held her 
chained. The voice of the tempter was in her ear. Sight and 
smell w r ere filled with the exquisite branch, the delicious fra- 
grance ; and if such were revealed, what must be its taste and 
touch, when to pluck and eat would make her as gods, knowing 
good and evil ? Weak, frail, unguarded, for the still small voice 
of the soul was lost in that hour’s tempest* was it marvel that 
she fell ? Could she have done otherwise ? The bulwark of 
faith was shivered, her heart was open and defenceless — she 
was alone, alone, for even the guardian within, if not fled, was 
silent. The God of infinite love and compassion beheld, but 
approached not ; and wherefore ? If He permitted, ordained, why 
did He punish ? Oh, had the voice of his creature called on 
Him in that terrible hour ; had but the faintest cry ascended for 
help, for strength, for mercy ; had but the struggling murmur 
arisen, “ Father, thy words are truth, let me but believe ,” 
strength, help, faith, would have poured their reviving rays into 
her sinking soul, and she had been saved — saved for immor- 
tality, saved to glorify her God ! It was not that she had not 
the power so to pray. Free-will was her own — to obey, or disobey 
p— to adhere, or to rebel. Of herself, indeed, she could not have 


26 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


resisted ; but she had equal power to call upon the Lord, as cc 
listen to the tempter. According to the path she chose, would 
have been the issue. Infinite, measureless, as is the love of the 
Eternal, yet how dare we believe He will grant us help and 
strength, unless they are implored ? How dare we believe He 
will come forward to our aid, if we stand forth in our own 
strength, as if we needed naught; nay, through presumption, 
arrogance, self-righteousness, rebel against, and defy Him ? II» 
had said, “ Eat not of the tree of knowledge, for on the day thou 
eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” He had not commanded 
only, though that should have been sufficient from a loving 
Father to his children ; but the command was enforced with a 
warning, that love should be strengthened by reverential fear. 
He had given the power to resist temptation, by calling upon 
him : but if that power were trampled upon and utterly disre- 
garded ; and the creature of His hand, whose whole existence, 
felicity, strength, wisdom, had their being but in Him, so de- 
pended upon herself, ) as to be satisfied with her own strength, 
believing it was in her power to become as a god, and so defy- 
ing Him, is it contradiction to assert, that the All-wise, All- 
merciful, All- just, permitted, and yet punished ? Surely, surely, 
there is not one portion of this mournful history, which, on 
mature consideration, will be found irreconcilable with the 
attributes of the Eternal, or with His dealings with His creatures. 

44 She took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.” For a brief inter- 
val, we may suppose, the tumult within, the struggle between 
virtue and vice, innocence and guilt, was stilled in a strange, 
fearful intoxication of sinful joy. She had broken through the 
barrier which, at the words of the serpent, seemed suddenly of 
iron, it so degraded her by its harshness and injustice. She was 
independent, had acted by herself, had shaken off all control ; 
and the full tide of guilty pleasure so swept over her soul as to 
permit for the moment no thought but of herself. But this 
lasted not long : the reaction came with the one thought — her 
husband. Terror of his anger was, in all probability, the first 
emotion — how might she evade it ? Fear, notwithstanding her 
independence, deadened, banished, frustrated every feeling cf 
remorse ; repentance, sorrow — all would avail her nothing now ; 
there was but one way to avert her husband’s wrath — to make 
him disobedient as herself. The crime would appear less could 
another share it. She recollected the influence she possessed ; 


PERIOD I. EVE. 


*2l 


aay, that she had been created to be his help, to soften his 
sterner and less yielding nature, and would it fail her now \ 
There was no pause, there could be none ; guilt ever hurries on 
its victims. On her arguments, her persuasions, holy writ is 
silent. It was enough — “ she gave also unto her husband with 
her, and he did eat.” 

The crime was consummated. Love itself, the purest, noblest, 
dost influencing of those spiritual blessings vouchsafed to mar. 
by his Creator — love, deeper for the creature than the Creator, 
deeming the gift more precious than the Giver — love it was 
which to Adam was the tempter, and so converted the richest 
blessing to the direst curse. The specious offers, the dazzling 
allurements of the serpent had, perhaps, to his stronger, more 
steadfast nature, been of no avail. He had no need of ambition, 
for he was lord over the whole created world. A glance from 
his eye, a stern rebuke from his lips, had awed even the subtlest 
of the beasts into silence, and banished him for ever ; but 
strength and firmness fled before the endearing influence of the 
being, whom, created to perfect his happiness, he loved better than 
himself. Excuse for his weakness, indeed, there is none ; but if 
such may be the extent of woman’s influence (and it is as power- 
ful even now), how fearful is her responsibility, and how deep 
should be her humility, how fervent her petitions for grarfe to 
guide aright ! 

Not long might the triumph of guilt last. Day declined — 
the lour of evening came which they were wont so joyfully to 
welcome, for it brought with it the voice of God. Remorse 
had come with all its horrors, and now for the first time the 
extent of their sin stood before them. Terror banished all of 
love, as all of joy ; and when the first sound of the Eternal’s 
voice reached them, they fled in anguish to hide themselves 
amid the trees of the garden. Vain hope ! but proving how all 
of spirit and of mind was crushed and buried in this first and 
awful sway of guilt. “ And the Lord God called unto Adam, and 
said unto him, Where art thou ? And he said, I heard thy voice 
in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked ; and I hid 
myself. And the Lord God said, Who told thee that thou wast 
naked 1 Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded 
thee that thou shouldst not eat? And the man said, The 
woman thou gavest to be with me gave me of the fruit, 
end I did eat. Ana the Lord God said unto the woman, 
2 


28 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


What is this thou hast done ? And the woman taid, Th*j 
serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.” 

Though to Him all was known, yet would not the beneficent, 
.he ever-loving, aye, even at that moment still loving God 
condemn without question, judge without permitting defence. 
And how upbraiding, how loving the appeal, “ What is this 
that thou hast done ?” breathing a Father’s sorrowing mercy in 
the very midst of justly deserved punishment. There was no 
consuming wrath, no terrifying anger, naught to betray that 
mighty and awful Being at whose first word might be annihila- 
tion. 

The Eternal pronounced not sentence without requiring and 
waiting for reply : but what was that reply ? Accusation 
ot another, not self- abhorrence and lowly repentance. How 
fearful ns the change wrought in the heart , as well as in the 
spirit A man, by his sin ! Where now w r as his deep love for 
Eve, that he could say, vainly hoping to exculpate himself, 
“ The woman thou didst give me, she gave me of the fruit, and 
T did eat?” She had led him by the power of his love into sin ; 
but from that moment her power was at an end, and he cared 
not to give her up to justice, so he excused himself. How 
terrible a commencement of her punishment must have been 
her husband’s words to the still loving heart of Eve ! It was 
true she bad done as he had said ; but was he to be her accuser ? 
And to her were those words of sorrowing compassion said, 
“ What is this that thou hast done ?” Hast thou indeed so used 
the power, the beauty, the influence with which I endowed thee 
for so different a purpose ? She denied it not : she said not one 
word to justify her sin towards her husband ; his words had 
entered her heart with the first sharp pang which human affec- 
tion knew, and there was no attempt at defence or evasion ; — 
'‘The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.” If Adam had 
stooped to lay the blame of his own weakness upon one whom 
he had loved, instead of bewailing his own sin, it was no wonder 
Eve, not yet awakened to what she should have done to avert 
the temptation, conscious but of increasing misery, thought only 
of what might seem excuse, “ The serpent beguiled me.” The 
Eternal knew she had spoken truth ; and, still guided by that 
mercy and justice which in God alone are so perfectly united, 
there is no need of “ man’s ways ” to reconcile them, proceeded 
to pronounce sentence according to the degrees of guilt. 


PERIOD I. EVE. 


29 


This is not the place to enter into a dissertation on the 
punishment awarded to the serpent ; suffice it that there seems 
no hidden or allegorical meaning in the inspired historian’s simp.o 
words. The serpent, as a beast of the field, beguiled , and as a 
Deast of the field was punished. Nor can an Israelite acknow- 
ledge any allusion to, or any necessity for, a crucified and atoning 
Saviour, in the very simple words, “I will put enmity between 
thee and the woman, between thy seed and her seed ; it shall 
bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” For a Hebrew, 
the words can only be taken in their purely literal sense. We 
are particular on this point; because thus early, in the perusal 
of the sacred Scriptures, the Jewish and Gentile readings differ ; 
and from childish readings of Bible histories by Gentile writers, 
we may find ourselves giving credence to an assertion for which 
we have no Mosaic authority, and which, in after years, we w'ould 
gladly root out from the mystical and contradictory opinions 
with which it confuses our ideas. 

Eve’s chastisement was severer than her husband’s, and it was 
just that so it was, for she was the first transgressor. Death, 
indeed, — that the dust of which the frame was composed should 
return to dust, — was the awful sentence pronounced on both ; 
for such had been threatened from the first if they disobeyed : 
but during their sojourn upon earth, the sharper and severer 
trial of pain, of multiplied sorrows, of sinking comparatively in 
the scale of strength and intellect, of becoming subject to her 
husband, not, as before, from the sweet obedience of love, but 
from the sterner mandate of duty ; of being exposed, as a mother, 
to a hundred sources of anguish of which man knows nothing ; 
for his deepest, dearest love for his offspring is not like a mother’s, 
subject to the thousand petty anxieties and cares which, indepen- 
dent of severer maternal trials, fill her heart from the moment 
she hears the first faint cry of the new-born until death. And 
these trials ivere Eve’s, and they are woman’s. Man had, indeed, 
his work ; the earth was cursed through his sin, and forbidden 
to yield her fruit without the severest labor ; he was to go 
forth from the Paradise of innocence and love to till the ground 
w lienee he was taken — banished, and for ever. 

The voice of their God, for the first time heard in reproachful 
though still forbearing inquiry, and then in fearful condemnation, 
removed the blackening veil of sin. The spirit burst from the 
chains of guilt and sin, and while it bowed in agony and >y worse 


so 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


before the Father and the Judge, and acknowledged this awful 
sentence just, drew them once more to each other. Love was 
not given only for the happy : to the sorrowing, the repentant, 
it comes soothing while it softens, seeming, even while it deepens 
the heavy floods of grief, to banish all of hardness, of selfishness, 
and of despair. The justice of the Eternal marked the woman 
as the greater sinner — Adam’s further wrath was needless; 
remorse too told him that, as the stronger, the firmer, he should 
have resisted her persuasions, that his disobedience was his own 
sin, not her’s ; and we may believe that, as weak, trembling, 
bowed to the very dust, not from the thoughts of her own chas- 
tisement so much as from the reflection of what she had hurled 
upon her husband, for such still is womau, Adam once more 
received her to his heart, the sharer of his future toils, the soother 
of his threatened cares, even as she had before been the help- 
meet of his joy. 

And already Eve needed all of strength and comfort her earthly 
lord might give. Still remembering mere} 7 , the Eternal clothed 
them for their departure, endowing them with those faculties of 
invention, alike for their personal comfort as for the tillage of 
the ground, for which they had no need in Eden ; but the very 
gift betrayed the bleak and desert world they were about to seek. 
Uould they but remain in the home of their past innocence and 
joy, the anguish of the present might be sooner healed. Who 
that thinks a moment of what we now feel in turning from a 
beloved home, the scene of all our early hopes and joys and love, 
adorned with all of nature and of art, to seek another, im- 
poverished, and fraught with toil and danger, apart from every 
object, animate or inanimate, which has twined round our hearts 
and bound us there, — who, that pictures scenes like these, will 
refuse our general mother the need of sympathy as she turned 
from Eden. A change perhaps her sin had wrought even there. 
The birds flew aloft, trembling to approach that gentle bosom 
which had before been their resting-place ; the young animals 
fled in terror from her step ; and there was that in the changed 
fierce aspects of the beasts of the field, which caused her heart to 
sicken with deadly fear. The very flowers hung their heads and 
drooped when gathered ; they could not bear the toudi of sin. 
Yet to that woman’s heart Eden was Eden still — her home , the 
receiver of all those varied channels of love which could be spared 
from her husband ; and to turn from it, never to approach it more. 


PERIOD I. EVE. 


31 


and from the consequences of her own act, how deep must have 
oeen her agony, how touching its remorse, and how necessarv 
the support of love ! 

Though Moses, in his brief detail of past events, simply follows 
the expulsion from Eden by the birth of Cain, we have sufficient 
authority from the unchangeable attributes of the Eternal, to 
believe, that the same love which provided Adam and Eve with 
clothing, directed and blessed their wanderings ; and though no 
longer revealing His gracious presence, as in Eden, yet still 
inspiring the power of prayer and belief in His constant omni- 
presence and protection. Their sin had indeed changed their 
earthly nature, — the good had been conquered bv the evil. It 
was henceforth a difficult and weary task to subdue the evil 
inclinations, the proneness to disobedience and self-righteousness. 
It was a labor of toil and tears to bring the heavenly essence 
once more even to a faint and disfigured likeness of its God ; the 
voice of the soul, once silenced as it had been, could only be 
heard after years of watching and prayer. The Eternal, in His 
prescience, knew this would be, not so much in Adam himself 
(for repentance and sorrow brought him back through his 
punishment to holiness and constant commune with his God), but 
in his offspring. Further and further, as the children of men 
advanced from their first father — as the tale of creation, of the 
Eternal’s visible presence in Paradise, of all which His love had 
formed for His favored creature, man, became fainter and fainter 
in the distance of the past, — so would the likeness of the Lord 
in which man was made, become more and more effaced, and 
sin become more and more ascendant. For this reason then it 
was, that the Eternal, alike in His wisdom and justice and mercy, 
ordained death as the end of all, the righteous and the wicked ; 
for Solomon himself telleth us “ there is no man that sinneth 
not and we read in the narrative of Moses himself (Gen. vi. 6) 
that every imagination of man’s heart was only evil continually, 
and it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, 
and it grieved him at his heart ; and again (Gen. viii.), “ I will 
not curse the ground any more for man’s sake ; for the imagina- 
tion of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” 

But the Mosaic creed of love and perfect justice goes n;> 
further. We utterly repudiate, deny, and hold in abhorrence, 
the awful creed which condemns every man’s soul for the sin of 
Adam. To use the language of our own venerable sages 


G2 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


“ Altliough tlie descendants of Adam inherited the body from 
him, and with it the maledictions attached thereto, it is not 
because they received corporeal existence from him that the 
souls of all mankind are condemned, for they had not existence 
from Adam , but are a direct emanation from God. Therefore 
Noah, Shem, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all the other just, 
did not pay the sin of Adam , nor were their souls condemned.” * 
And still more convincing proof from the Word of God; Pen- 
tateuch, History, Psalms, Proverbs, and Prophets, almost every 
page bears witness that each man is responsible for his own 
individual acts. — “ See, I have set before you this day Life and 
Good, Death and Evil; therefore choose life , that thou and 
thy seed may live” (Deut. xxx. 15 and 19). “ Then they that 

feared the Lord spake often one to another ; and the Lord 
hearkened, and heard it: and a book of remembrance was 
written before Him for them that feared the Lord and thought 
upon his name. And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of 
hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels ; and I will spare 
them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him. Then 
shall ye return, and discern between the righteous and the 
wicked ; between him that serveth God , and him that serveth 
him not ” (Mai. iii. 16, 17, 18). “ Repent , and turn yourselves 

from all your transgressions ; so iniquity shall not be your ruin. 
Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby ye have 
transgressed ; and make you a new heart and a new spirit : for 
why wiL ye die, O house of Israel ? For I have no pleasure in 
the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord God : therefore turn 
yourselves, and live ye” (Eze. xviii. 30, 31, 32). “Turn ye 
unto me, saith the Lord of hosts, and I will turn unto you” 
(Zach. i. 3). 

It wo ild be useless transcribing all the passages in the Bible 
similar to the above — and teeming with the doctrine of indivi- 
dual responsibility, and individual power to regain the favor of 
the Eternal — which is completely opposed to the Gentile creed. 
But while we reject, wholly and utterly, all belief in the Naza- 
rene doctrine, that we are each and all, even the new-born babe, 
tondemned to everlasting misery unless we acknowledge Jesua 
■ — reject it, because it is contrary to the doctrines of Moses; 

* The Conciliator, vol. ii. page 214. Translated from the Spanish o/ 
Manasseh Ben Israel, by E. H. Lindo, Esq. 


PERIOD 


. EVE. 


33 


rf^ntiary to tlie whole spirit of the Bible ; contrary to every 
attribute of a just and merciful God ; we equally reject the mis- 
taken arid sceptical belief that the disobedience of our first 
parents in no way affects us now. If its effects were only con- 
fined to them, where is the mercy, the justice of the Lord, in 
condemning all their seed to return to the dust ? Who that 
looks into himself and knows the “plague of his own heart,” 
the difficulty to realize spirituality and holiness — who that reads 
his Bible with faith, and prayer, and marks the prevalence of 
evil even there, the failings and the weaknesses of the holiest 
men, even those hallowed by the appellation of the “ friends of 
God,” will still refuse belief that the disobedience of our first 
parents so far altered our nature as to give the body more pow- 
erful dominion than the soul ; and thus, by deadening the 
spiritual influence within us, exposing us to temptation of every 
kmd, and consequently but too often to sin ; and rendering it a 
difficult and often desponding task to give the spiritual domi- 
nion over the corporeal , and to devote our whole hearts — not 
alone in our closets, but in the duties and occupations of the 
world still to serve and love our God. What would have been 
the glorious nature of Adam and Eve if they had not sinned, 
we know not ; for it is a subject far too holy for speculation or 
conjecture : but that their transgression produced consequences 
vliich demanded that not only themselves but their seed should 
return to dust, is a scriptural truth which no one who believes 
in Moses and the Prophets can, we think, have sufficient bold- 
ness to deny. But the soul it touched not. — An emanation 
from God Himself, it will return to Him, untouched by any sin 
but those of the body in whom it was breathed ; and there, at 
the bar of God, our own acts, purified by mercy, judged by the 
ways and thoughts of the Lord — which are not the ways and 
thoughts of man — guided by the law his mercy gave, hallowed 
by faith and justified by love — our own acts must be our wit- 
ness or our condemnation. Nor is this an individual doctrine 
lightly and carelessly entered upon or produced from one par- 
ticular class of reading. It has been the thought and study of 
ong years, based on an earnest and prayerful study of the Holy 
Scriptures, and on the spirit pervading the writings of every 
Hebrew sage which are accessible to woman. We have brought 
it strongly forward ; because, unless we know exactly what wo 
io believe and what we do not believe from the verv beginning 


34 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


of the Holy Scriptures, our readings must always be attended 
with obscurity and pain, and the very attributes of the Eternal 
difficult to be realized amid the awful scenes of wickedness 
which the historical books present. We will now proceed with 
the more private history of Eve. 

Years must have rolled over the heads of our first parents 
since their expulsion, ere the fearful event took place, which, 
although it mentions not their names, must recall our attention 
to them. Although, in comparison, they had become degraded, 
and the recollection of their sin must ever have remained with 
its stinging remorse, — still, repentance and real sorrow, meek 
submission to their chastisement and acknowledgment of its 
justice, raised them from their first abject misery, and permitted 
them once more, through prayer and thanksgiving and sacrifice, 
to commune with the Lord. Eve’s exclamation on the birth of 
Cain — “ I have gotten a man from the Lord,” proves how closely 
and devoutly she still traced all blessings from His gracious 
hand : — hallowing her maternal joy by gratitude to Him. His 
love had bestowed on her a blessing unknown even in Eden — a 
child — a possession peculiarly her own and her husband’s ; and 
in the exultation of her grateful joy she calls his name yp Cain, 
from rPp r> to possess or to acquire. In his early infancy, ere he 
became awake to right and wrong, his parents could but feel 
enjoyment to train him up so as to know no sin, to love and 
serve the Lord, and to give them love and reverence in return 
for the deep, endless fondness they lavished upon him. But by 
the name bestowed upon their second son, Abel, we may almost 
suppose that they had already felt the vanity of these hopes and 
wishes ; that even in his boyhood Cain manifested those evil 
passions and that headstrong will, which led in after years to 
such fearful consequences. 

The effects of Eve’s disobedience were now to he displayed in 
her own offspring — the child of exultation and joy — whom 
die had welcomed with such delight, that she almost felt as if 
no sorrow or suffering could assail her more, was the instrument 
in the Eternal hand to bring her back meekly and submissively 
to Him, in prayer for that beloved one, in recognition that 
her sin was working still. The passions and rebellion of 
her first-born brought all the agony of remorse fresh upon 
her heart ; and deep as was the '*oy with which she had hailed 


PERIOD I. E V E. 


35 


his birth, Mas the anxiety, the suffering, his dawning cha- 
racter called forth. 

Actuated by such emotions, it was with sorrow, then, more 
than joy, that the birth of her second boy was hailed. She 
had already felt the vanity, the transientness of her hopes ; and 
mournfully she called his name bjtl Hebei — transientness oi 
vanity, from which signifies to follow a vain thing, tc 

cherish vain thoughts. But as ; s the case (how often even 
now !) the child of tears and anticipated sorrow, proved as dear 
and precious a blessing as the son of exultation was of 
grief. She saw in him the ascendency of the spiritual, the 
deathless part of their mingled nature, that evil could still 
be subdued, and man be still acceptable and worthy in 
the sight of his Creator. The compassionate love of the Eter- 
nal, while He chastised through Cain, gave hope and trust and 
comfort through Abel. He showed through these varying 
natures, that free will to choose the good and eschew the 
evil was still given ; and that though the latter to the eyes 
of the world might seem, nay was, the ascendant, He would 
yet preserve his witnesses among mankind, to keep alive the 
knowledge of the Lord, and prove the pre-eminence, the beauty, 
the glorjq and the consolation of piety and virtue. 

So years rolled on : the boys grew up to manhood. And 
though it is not specifically mentioned, it is evident that 
Eve must also have borne a daughter, who, as was abso- 
lutely necessary in the early stages of the world, became 
the wife of Cain. Some writers believe that Cain and Abel 
were both born with twin sisters. It may or may not be, 
as it must be only conjecture — though Cain’s wife only is men- 
tioned. 

The words of scripture “and he (Adam) begat sons and 
daughters,” are sufficient for our information. In all probability 
his family was a large one, — that his seed might fulfil the 
intention of the Eternal in peopling the world ; but how many 
daughters he had before the death of Abel does not appear, and 
is of little consequence. 

During the growth of their elder children, the lives of 
our first parents differ little in feeling from those of the present 
day. Their employments, indeed, were as unlike as patriarchal 
feirnplicity is from worldly interest and luxury — the pea* 4 .? of 


30 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


nature from the contention of the world. Tn reading the narra< 
tives of the Bible, we often blend situation with feeling, and 
believe that as the one is too antiquated for interest and exam- 
ple, so is the other for sympathy and love. But the Bible tells 
of no character above human nature ; and why not then, in 
perusing the circumstances of their simple lives, try their feelings 
by the standard of our own ? Who that is a mother, does not 
feel anxiety, pleasure, grief, joy, despondency, and hope, almost 
all at the same time, according to the differing dispositions of her 
children ? Who that is a parent does not acknowledge that 
maternal love may combine the intensest joy with the intensest 
grief? And will they not then sympathize in the feelings 
of Eve ? — at one time bowed to the very dust in the anguish 
occasioned by the sinful inclinations and rude temper of her first 
born, in self-accusation that she, perhaps, was the original cause, 
even as an affectionate mother very often accuses herself for the 
faults of her offspring — at another, weeping tears of sweet joy, 
and love, and consolation, on the gentle bosom of her Abel, 
w'hose whole life and thoughts were directed to piety and virtue 
to God and to his parents — whose very existence, as her 
own had been in Paradise, seemed bright with reverence 
and love? 

But even this life of mingled grief and comfort might not 
last. Not yet had Eve sufficiently atoned for her disobedience, 
and proved her love and faith, to pass through the awful portals 
of death to the home prepared for her in heaven. Death, 
as concerned herself, her husband, her children, w 7 as still 
the dark shadow through which as yet no certain light had 
beamed. The Eternal, in His mercy, had prepared to reveal it, 
but through clouds of denser, mure appalling blackness than had 
yet gathered round His creatures. 

Wrought up to phrensy by the preference manifested towards 
the pious offering of his younger brother — refusing to acknow- 
ledge that it was the temper of his own mind at fault, and that 
he had himself trampled on, and defied the favor he yet 
coveted, when shown to another — still sullenly and obstinately 
encouraging the evil, even when the Lord, in infinite mercy, 
condescended Himself to speak with his rebellious servant, 
and asking why he was wroth, informed him that though 
sin was ever crouching beside him, he (Cain) had the 'power 
to rule over and subdue it, still disregarding even this, listening 


K V R . 


3 ? 


PERIOD I. 

but to the fearful instigations of his own heart, — * it came 
to pass, when they were in the field together, that Cain rose up 
against his brother Abel, and slew him.” 

The dark terror of death was mysterious no longer. In 
its most fearful, most appalling shape, it had descended upon 
earth — the bright, the beautiful, the loving, and the holy, there 
he lay before the eyes of his agonized parents, his life-blood 
iyeing the green-sward — that face so fair, so sweet an index 
of the pure glorious soul — those limbs, so soft and round 
and graceful, whose every movement had brought joy to 
his mother’s heart — they gazed upon them still, beautiful as 
if he slept, save that there was a stillness and a coldness as the 
earth on which he lay. This, then, was death, and it had been 
dealt by a brother's hand. Can any woman, much less a 
mother, reflect on Eve’s immeasurable agony, and yet pass 
lightly and heedlessly over this first narration of Holy Writ, 
refusing sympathy, even interest, in the deep dark floods 
of misery, with which, though her name is not mentioned, 
those few words of a brother’s hate and wrath and murder 
teem ? Not alone a mother’s anguish, deprived of both her 
children in one fearful day — not, not alone the wild yearn- 
ings of affection towards the guilty and the exile, strug- 
gling with the passionate misery for her own bereavement, but 
more crushing, more agonizing still — it was her work — she had 
disobeyed to obtain the knowledge of good and evil. — and how 
appallingly had that forbidden knowledge poured back its 
stinging poison into her own heart ! Her beautiful had fallen 
— she might never, never gaze upon him, list his sweet 
voice more — the dust had gone to its dust — sent to his grave in 
his youth, his sinlessness — the helpless and the innocent crushed 
by the strong hand of the guilty — and the Eternal had looked 
down from his awful throne and interfered not. Why had the 
only innocent , the only righteous , being the first to pay the 
penalty of death, when his guilty parents and yet more guiltv 
brother were permitted still to live? Nay, the doom of Cain, 
which the hardened one himself declared “ was greater than he 
could bear,” was not to die, but live as a wanderer whom none 
might slay. Why might such things be ? Were they recon- 
cilable with those attributes of justice and of love and long 
suffering, which the Eternal had already proclaimed, through 


HS 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


His conduct, to bis creatures ? They were : for in the death of 
the innocent, immortality was proclaimed ! 

The disobedient looked on the death their sin had brought — 
they felt, in their own bosoms, the deepest agony of bereave- 
ment — they saw not the terror, only as the end of existence ; 
but by the scythe cutting down the young in his first beautiful 
apring, and in the full prime of holiness and good, they learned 
what their own death, at the moment of disobedience, could not 
have taught — that the righteous must also be cut off, as well as 
the guilty — that death was not only chastisement for itself 
alone , but in the deep agony it inflicted upon the living , in the 
awful trial of separation and bereavement, and the utter loneli- 
ness of heart when a beloved one goes ; and, this learned, the 
world beyond death, the dwelling of the righteous, the reunion 
of the divine essence with its parent Fount — immortality — was 
revealed ! 

That the caviller, the sceptic, the thoughtless will deny this, 
because we can bring forward no written proof of its truth, we 
are perfectly aware : but we write for the believer, for the Israel- 
ite, who not only reads the words of his Bible, but explains 
them by one only unerring test, the attributes of God. The 
question is simply this — Do we believe in a God ? That He is, 
as He proclaimed Himself, “ merciful and gracious, long-suffer- 
ing, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for 
thousands , forgiving iniquity and sin, yet clearing not the guilty,” 
without repentance and amendment? Do we believe in- Him, 
as in every page of His Holy Word He is revealed, or do we 
not ? If we do not — if we deny the existence of a just and 
merciful, though in many instances inscrutable, God, then 
indeed we may deny our immortality ; but if we acknowledge 
there is a God, aye, and one whose justice and whose love are 
infinite and perfect as Himself, we must not only believe in our 
own immortality, but trace its doctrine running through the Holy 
Scriptures, alike from the death of Abel to the last verses of 
Malachi, pervading, vivifying, spiritualizing its every portion, 
•oven as our mortal frame is pervaded, vivified, and spiritualized, 
by the invisible , yet ever breathing soul. We do not doubt 
and question that we have a soul, because we have nothing pal- 
pable and evident by which to prove it ; and even as the soul 
is the essence , the spirit of our being, so is immortality th« 
>£sence and die spirit of the Bible. 


PERIOD I. EVE. 


3 $ 


\A hero was the mercy, nay, the justice of the Eternal, had he 
mmished with eternal death the only righteous of His creatures ? 
We can scarcely even dwell upon the idea for a moment with- 
out impiety. Abel was taken, that while death in his most 
fearful form was revealed to manifest all the terrible evil and 
anguish Eve’s sin had brought, the hope and promise of 
immortality might be given, and the agonized parents comforted. 
He was removed “ from the evil to come,” to that world, where 
“ light had been sown for the righteous” from the beginnings 
and would be for ever. 

But though this revelation must have brought with it com- 
fort unspeakable, yet the heavy trial of Eve might not even, 
through this beneficent assurance, be entirely assuaged. She 
could not now, as she had done in Eden, realize so blessedly the 
pre-eminence of the spirit over the feelings of the clay. Though 
comforted, the weakness of humanity must still have been too 
often in the ascendant, and taught her all the bitterness of grief. 
Even though the thought of Abel might, through the unselfish- 
ness of woman’s love, be tranquillized by the idea, that however 
she might suffer, he was happy, as she had been in Eden, no 
such comfort could attend the thought of Cain. It was vain to 
measure maternal love by the worth or unworthiness of its 
objects. It was not only that he was exiled for ever from her 
sight, that her yearning heart might never seek to soothe him 
more ; but she knew that he was, he must be a wretched wanderer, 
and the mother felt his wretchedness, though she saw it not, in 
addition to her own. Mercy, indeed, had tempered his chastise- 
ment, for he had not been cut off in his sin — he had been 
doomed to length of days on earth, that he might repent and 
atone ; but this, to a weak and suffering parent, though she 
might struggle to Jiff up her heart in gratitude, could not afford 
consolation. 

There is little more to narrate in the life of Eve ; but that 
little, as every other incident in her life, proves forcibly the 
Eternal’s still compassionating love. To remove all of utter 
bereavement from His first created, first beloved, when the first 
agony of Eve’s heavy trial was over, God gave her another 
son. And she called his name TO Seth, because she said, God 
has appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain 
slew.” And as from Seth descended a line of venerable patri- 
archs, one of whom was taken uo to heaven, without dying, for 


10 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


his righteousness ; and from them came Noah, who alone waa 
saved from universal destruction ; then through him Abraham, 
the favored servant and friend of the Eternal — Abraham, to? 
whose sake Israel was the chosen, and is still the beloved of 
the Lord, we may quite believe that Eve was not only com- 
forted by the gift of a son, but that even as Abel he was 
righteous, and that he was the comforter of his parents — that 
in beholding his opening manhood, the dawning virtue and 
graces of his spirit, the fiery trial of their early life was soothed, 
and they could trace the hand of the Lord bringing forth good 
out of the very midst of evil, and rest satisfied, that however 
the strong and the guilty might seem to prosper, He would 
never leave Himself without witnesses upon earth. 

Although there is no mention of the death of Eve, the words 
of Holy Writ, informing us that “ Adam lived eight hun- 
dred years after he had begotten Seth, and had sons and 
daughters,” would prove that she, too, lived that period, there 
being no mention whatever, as is often the case with the other 
patriarchs, of Adam taking another wife. The former tempta- 
tions, trials, and sorrows of our first parents, must have then 
been looked back upon by them in their old age, as we should 
look on the events which may have befallen us before the age 
of twenty, when we have reached the venerable years of four- 
score. That long life was evidently granted in mercy. Had 
they been cut off on the instant of their transgression, it must 
have been for eternity, or death would have been no punish- 
ment. Had they oeen taken sooner, we will suppose before the 
death of Abel, though they might have been spared that bitter 
sorrow, still darkness, and fear for themselves, and doubt as to 
the ways and attributes of the Eternal, must have crowded 
round them, and filled them w’ith despair as to the probable 
effects of their sin on their offspring, and their offspring’s seed 
Long life, through the infinite mercy of the Eternal, removed 
these evils. While they felt, in all the bitterness of remorse, 
all the evil they had wrought, they were yet comforted by the 
revelation of immortality, and the consequent incentive for the 
struggling after righteousness, which, without such blessed incen- 
tive, man could never have achieved. They beheld, that 
though the likeness of God within them had been dulled in all, 
and in some would be almost entirely effaced, it might in 
heaven be regained, if while on earth it was sought with faith 


PERIOD I. EVE 


4 ] 


Rnd works. They learned, that though discord, strife, and 
oppression, and labor, and care, would reign tumultuously on 
earth, to the extinction, in appearance , of all that was spiritual 
and good, there was yet in heaven an omnipresent and ever- 
acting love, which would so over-rule the world, that even 
from “ transitory evil” would spring forth “ universal good,” 
and every seemingly dark and contradictory event below, tend 
to the glory, the extension, and the perfection of the divine 
economy above. 

To obtain this knowledge our first parents were spared, and 
not cut off in their sin ; and can we, their offspring, even at this 
length of time, peruse their eventful history, without feeling our 
hearts glow with grateful adoration of the love which guided 
and hallowed them throughout? The stream of time which 
divides us is indeed so wide, that we are apt to feel that events 
so far distant can concern us little. Yet while we trace in our 
mortal frame, and painful infirmities, the effects of their disobedi- 
ence, shall we not acknowledge, with grateful and adoring faith, 
that the same love which guided, blessed, and pardoned them, 
is still extended unto us ? 

To dwell in paradise, to be blessed with direct communings 
with the Eternal and His heavenly messengers, are indeed not 
ours ; birt many a home — aye, many a lot is a sinless paradise 
to a young and gentle girl ; and loving parents will so throng 
her path with care and blessings, that of evil she knows little, 
and temptation is afar off. And often, too often, like Eve, 
these blessings are undervalued and sacrificed, not through her 
sit and disobedience, but from woman’s unfortunate desire to 
graso something more than is her allotted portion ; — her discon- 
tent with the lowlier station which her weaker frame and less 
powerful mind mark imperatively as her own — her mistaken 
notion, that humility is degradation ; and unless she compels 
man to accede to her her rights, they will be trampled on, and 
never acknowledged — her curiosity leading her too often to 
covet knowledge which she needs not for the continuance 
of her happiness. Oh ! let not woman deny that such too often 
are her characteristics, arid exclaim with scorn of Eve’s weakness, 
that had she been in Eve’s place, surrounded with felicity as she 
was>, the forbidden tree might have remained for ever ere she 
would have touched it. She who thus thinks, commits uncon- 
sciously Eve’s first sin, trusting too much in her own strength ; 


42 THE W0MB.V OF ISRAEL. 

and, ill consequence, is just as likely to fall beneath the very first 
temptation which assails her. 

Let her not quiet such fears by the thought that Eve’s par 
ticular temptation cannot be hers. No ; but snares innume- 
rable, and equally fearful, surround us. Each day brings its 
own temptations, each day calls upon us to pray against them • 
for we know not how or in what shape they may arise, and how 
soon, if we trust in our own strength, they may triumph and 
lead us to perdition. Had Eve been truly humble she had not 
sinned. And if in Eden humility was needed, if even there 
without such panoply of proof, woman fell, how much more 
should we encourage it now ! Humility is to woman her truest 
safeguard, her loveliest ornament, her noblest influence, her 
greatest strength. Teaching her her true station in regard to 
man, it leads her ever to the footstool of her God, thence to 
derive firmness, devotedness, fortitude, consolation, hope, all that 
she needs. While such privilege is hers, let her not repine 
that God lowered Eve and made her less than man ; let her not 
look back with anger that the sin of one woman should thus 
punish her descendants. From the very first she was endowed 
differently to man ; had she not been the weaker, the serpent 
had not marked her as his easier prey. And, as our own 
nature is even now as Eve’s, let us rather thank God that his 
love has granted us that lowly station where our natural quali- 
ties may best be proved, and our weaknesses and failings have 
less power to work us harm. Let us cultivate, with all our 
heart and soul and might, the lovely flower of humility, which, 
by teaching us to think lowlily of ourselves, will render us con- 
tented and thankful for the blessings around us, the gifts 
bestowed on us, instead of urging us to covet more; — the 
sweet flower on whose breath our souls are enabled more con- 
tinually to ascend to God, and whose petals, seemingly so frail 
and tender, have yet more power to guard us from temptation 
and presumption than an unsheathed sword. Let us not pause 
till it is found and worn ; and if it make us invisible as itself, 
save to those who seek and value us, it will shed around us an 
atmosphere of love and peace and joy, with which no other 
flower can vie ; and in death, as in life, we shall bless God foi 
ts possession, as for the dearest gift He has vouchsafed. 

Would I then, some may exclaim, deny all privileges tc 
tfomen — refuse to acknowledge their equality with man — do 


PERIOD 


. E VE . 


43 


?rade them as the Jewish religion is falsely accused of doing? 
No ! for in the sight of God, in their spiritual privileges, in 
their peculiar gifts and endowments, the power of performing 
their duties in their own sphere, in their responsibility, they are 
on a perfect equality with man. But I would conjure them to 
seek humility, simply from its magic power of keeping woman 
in her own beautiful sphere, without one wish, one ambitious 
whisper, to exchange it for another. While tl ere, while satisfied 
and rejoicing in the infinite love and wisdom which placed us 
there, we are not only in the privileges enumerated above, man’s 
equal, — but however in strength of frame, immense capability 
of physical and mental exertion, in might and grasp of intellect, 
his inferior; yet in the depth and faithfulness of love, in the 
capability of feeling and enduring, in devotedness and fortitude 
— alike in bodily and mental trial — we are unanswerably his 
superior. Then has not woman enough to call for gratitude ? 
Endowed with influence over the heart of man, — oh ! let her 
remember for what fearful end Eve used that influence, and keep 
a constant guard of watchfulness and prayer over her heart to 
preserve her from its similar abuse. Let her remember the 
employments of Eve in Eden, and so cultivate her intellectual 
faculties in the study of God and nature, both animate and 
inanimate, that her mind may be strengthened, and in the cr.n 
templation of the beauties of creation, she may learn the true 
value of the beauty which may be hers. IIow small is its 
relative proportion, and yet how blessedly it may be used, even 
as the beauty of creation, for the glory of God, in its mild, sooth- 
ing, and benignant influence upon His creatures ! 

Above all, let the history of Eve impress this truth upon the 
hearts of her young descendants — that how r ever weak and faulty 
and abased, however sorrowing and bereaved, however reaping 
in tears the effects of indiscretion or graver error, — yet stil th<> 
compassion, the long suffering, the exhaustless love of tneir 
Father in Heaven is theirs ; that no circumstance in life can 
deprive them of that love, can throw a barrier between woman’s 
yearning heart and the healing compassion of her God. No; 
not even departure from Him, neglect, forgetfulness, will make 
Him forget or cease to compassionate, if she will but return in 
true repentance, and clinging faithfulness to his deep love once 
more. We cannot measure that exhaustless fount — for as high 
as the heaven from the earth, so great is its extent. We canuoi 


£-4 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 

weary that never-ceasing mercy — for as far as the East is from 
the West, so far, when we return to Him, doth He remove out 
transgressions from us. And will woman — whose whole exist- 
ence still is love — neglect or despise these thrice-blessed privi- 
leges; will the exile, the despised, the persecuted — for such 
has been, and is, the woman of Israel — will she not receive with 
grateful adoration the love vouchsafed, and ccme and make 
manifest the Sustainer, the Comforter, the Mainspring of her 
being ? To woman of every creed, of every race, of every rank 
-—life, though it may seem blessed, is a fearful desert without 
God. What then, without Him, is it to the woman of Israel, 
the exile and the mourner, who hath no land, no hope, no com- 
forter but Him? 


CHAPTER II. 

SARAH. 

So varied and so important are the incidents comprised m 
the life of Eve, that, on a mere superficial view, Sarah’s biogra- 
phy appears somewhat deficient in interest. Yet, as the beloved 
partner of Abraham, she ought to be a subject of reverence and 
love to her female descendants; and we will endeavor to brin» 
her history forward, that such she may become. Much of the 
Eternal’s love and pity towards His female children is mani- 
fested in her simple life, and also in the life of her bondwoman, 
Hagar, which is too closely interwoven with hers to be 
omitted. 

The real relationship between Abraham and Sarah, before 
marriage, has never yet been clearly or satisfactorily solved ; 
some commentators asserting she was his niece, the daughter 
of Haran his elder brother ; and others, that she was, as Abra- 
ham himself declares, his half-sister — “She is the daughter of 
my father, but not the daughter of my mother and she became 


PERIOD I. SARAH. 


45 


<r*y wife.” We believe tlie latter assertion much more likely 
to be the correct one, because, in the first place, there is no 
foundation whatever for the idea that she was Haran’s daughter, 
except the supposition that Iscah means Sarah (Gen. xi. 29 ) ; 
and, in the second, it is not probable that when Questioned by 
Abimelech, Abraham would have condescended to utter a false- 
hood. The Bible mentions Lot only as the child of Haran ; 
and Abraham himself says, Sarah was his half-sister. The 
latter relationship, as preventing marriage, is no proof in favor 
of her being his niece, as no laws of marriage had yet been 
issued ; and in the early stages of the world, such connexions 
were riot considered sin. 

Leaving this difficult decision to more curious speculators, we 
will proceed to subjects of greater interest. The first notice we 
have of Sarai is her accompanying her husband and Lot from 
the home of her kindred to a strange country, among all 
strange people, in simple obedience to the word of God. Holy 
writ is silent on the youth of Abram ; but it is the opinion of 
our ancient fathers, that his earnest desire after divine know- 
ledge — his pure and holy life — his affectionate and virtuous 
conduct, attracted towards him the blessing of the Lord, and 
caused him to be selected as the promulgator of the Divine 
Revelation. That Abram was exposed to many dangers on 
account of his loving obedience to the one sole invisible God, 
instead of acknowledging the idols of his race, is indeed very 
possible, and probably originated the first removal of his family 
to Charran, where also his father accompanied him. At Char- 
ran they seem to have dwelt in peace and prosperity, secured 
from former persecutors, so that it must have been no little trial 
to go forth again, more particularly without any definite cause 
for the removal. 

To Sarai the trial must have been more severe than to her 
husband. She was to go forth with him indeed; but it is 
woman’s peculiar nature to cling to home, home ties, and home 
affections — to shrink from encountering a strange world, teem- 
ing with unknown trials and dangers. Rather than the parting 
from a husband, indeed, all other partings may seem light ; but 
yet they are trials to a gentle woman : and the heart that can 
leave the home and friends of a happy youth — the associations 
of years — without regret, proves not that its affections are so 
centred on one object as to eschew all others ; but that it ia 


16 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


too often wrapped in a chilling indifference, which prevents 
strong emotions on any subject whatever. We have enough 
of Sarai in the Bible to satisfy us that such is not her charac 
ter. 

One cause for the love of home ties and associations, in t]»o 
heart of a rio-ht-feeling woman, originates in the belief that 
there she can do so much more good than elsewhere — that, 
unfitted by the weakness and infirmities of her frame from active 
toil, and the pursuit of goodly service, as falls to the lot of 
man, she can yet benefit her friends, children, and domestics, in 
the hallowed circle of home ; and better manifest the blessings 
of the Lord and the love she bears Him, there than amongst 
strangers. And this was especially the case with Sarai. By 
one of our ancient fathers it is said, that as Abram and Lot 
were permitted to turn many of their own sex from idolatry to 
the knowledge of the one true God, so also was Sarai granted 
the hallowed privilege of leading many of her female friends 
and domestics to the same blessed Fount. It was therefore, no 
doubt, a source of questioning and wonder in her mind, why 
the Eternal’s mandate to go forth should be given. She had 
not even experience in the Eternal’s glorious attributes, as dis- 
played in His dealings with His creatures, and through His 
word, to comfort and be her guide. All was mental darkness 
in the world around her, except her husband and those few 
whom he had been enabled to teach a partial knowledge of his 
God. They stood alone in their peculiar faith ; and how often, 
in such a case, do doubts and fears enter the breast of woman ! 
Yet it was enough that her husband prepared without question 
or hesitation to obey his God — to leave his aged father, his 
kindred, and his friends ; and, with simple and loving faith, she 
went with him where the Lord should lead. Well is it for us 
when we can do so likewise ; when, in some of. those bitterest 
trials that woman’s heart can know, the change of home or 
land, be it with our parents, or, husband, or more fearful still, 
alone , we can yet so stay upon our God that we can realize His 
presence, His loving mercy directing our weary way, and resting 
with us still. His direct communing by voice or sign, or 
through angelic messengers, is indeed no longer ours; but 
those that seek to love and serve Him may yet hear His still 
small voice breathing in the solemn whisper of their own hearts, 
and through the individual promises of His word. 


PERIOD I . S A R A H . 


41 


Accompanied by Lot and their household — expressed in the 
uerm, “ the souls they had gotten in Charran,” who were pro- 
Dably those whom they had instructed in the true faith — and 
carrying with them the substance they possessed, Abram and 
Sarai “ went forth into the land of Canaan,” which was inha- 
bited by a fierce people, and gave little hope of ever being 
possessed by the patriarch and his family, for by their constant 
journeyings it would seem as if they could not even obtain 
sufficient land to fix their home. Yet, there again the Lord 
appeared to the patriarch and renewed His promise — thus 
proving His tender compassion for the human weakness of His 
creatures, and encouraging their faith, when, without such 
encouragement, He knew it must have failed. To add to their 
numerous human discomforts and trials, a famine broke out in 
the land, so severe and grievous that Abram sought the land of 
Egypt ; and there, rendered fearful by the exceeding beauty of 
his wife, and the supposed barbarity of the land, he bade Sarcu 
call herself his sister, not his wife. 

In this first deception, however, Abram was much more to b* 
excused than in the second. He had not yet had all the con 
vincing proofs of the Eternal’s tender watchfulness and care, a? 
he had afterwards. He had gone to Egypt without the express 
command of the Lord, and this very fact, to one accustomed tc 
divine guidance, and not yet perhaps feeling himself sufficiently 
strong spiritually to go alone, rendered him more fearful thaF 
he would otherwise have been. He might also have thought, 
that as he was destined for a great end, it was his duty to use 
anv means to preserve the life so appointed, without sufficiently 
considering that life and death were equally in the hands of thp 
Eternal, and that He would preserve His servant alive, without 
the intervention of human means. Spiritual advancement 
requires effort, perseverance, and experience, as well as every 
other; and Abram himself, though the elect of the Eternal, 
could not obtain perfection and firmness in faith without some 
human tremblings, which it is enough for us to know, were 
Overruled, compassionated, and forgiven. We perceive by tho 
sacred narrative, that his intention was frustrated, and his words 
caused the very evil he dreaded ; — which is sufficient warning 
for us to avoid all departure from the straight line of truth — • 
while the continued care and favor of the Lord should check 
our presumptuous condemnation, and remind us. that if Hi* 


IS 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


justice and mercy thought proper to overrule and forgive, and 
continue, nay increase, His long tenderness towards Abram and 
his family, it is our part, instead of marvelling, to thank God 
that such weakness is recorded, that we may not feel it is human 
perfection alone which calls down His blessing, and so shrink 
back in terror and despair. 

This part of Sarai’s history gives us information generally 
very interesting to young female readers — that she was very 
beautiful. We are wont to imagine that the charms of sixty- 
five could not be very remarkable ; but reckoning according to 
the age to which mortals then lived, she was not older than a 
woman of thirty or five-and-thirty would be now, consequently 
in her prime ; endowed, as her history gives us authority to 
suppose, with a quiet, retiring dignity, which greatly enhanced 
her beauty, and rendered it yet more interesting than that of 
girlhood. 

Protected from this danger, his substance greatly increased by 
Pharaoh’s gifts, Abram, his wife, and household, retraced their 
steps to where “ his tent had been at first, between Bethel and 
Hai.” The altar which he had originally erected was still 
there, and again he and his family “ called on the name of the 
Lord.” The command of Pharaoh — “ Go thy way,” was most 
probably regarded and acted on by the patriarch as a warning, 
that his safest and most hallowed home was in the land to which 
the Lord had originally guided him. 

In the events which follow — the separation of Abram and Lot 
— the battle of the kings^ — the imprisonment and rescue of 
Lot — the blessing of Melchisedek — Holy Writ makes no men- 
tion of Sarai. She was performing those duties of an affec- 
tionate wife and gentle mistress of her husband’s immense 
establishment, which are nothing to write about, but which 
make up the sum of woman’s life, create her dearest and purest 
sources of happiness, and bring her acceptably before God. Ilei 
home was still an unsettled one. The Lord had again appeared 
to renew His promises to Abram — comforting him in the 
sorrow which Lot’s choice of a dwelling in the sinful Sodom had 
occasioned him, by the assurance that all the land which he saw, 
northward and southward, eastward and westward, would He 
give unto him and to his seed, and his seed’s seed for ever. 
That he was to “ Arise, and walk through the land, in the 
oreadth of it and in the length of it. for 1 will give it unto 


PERIOD I. SARAH. 


40 


thee.” In consequence of which, the tent of the patriarch was 
removed southward, to Main re in Hebron, and an altar built, at 
once to claim the land in the name of the Lord, and give to 
Abram and his household a place where to worship. The 
extent of the patriarch’s household may be imagined by the 
fact, that at his word, no less than three hundred and eighteen 
servants, born in his house and trained to arms, accompanied 
him to the rescue of his nephew. Those who were left to 
attend to his flocks and herds, which he possessed in great 
numbers, must have been in equal proportion ; and over these, 
during his absence, Sarai, assisted by the steward, had unlimited 
dominion. 

The beautiful confidence and true affection subsisting between 
Abram and Sarai, marks unanswerably their equality ; that his 
wife was to Abram friend as well as partner; and yet, that 
Sarai knew perfectly her own station, and never attempted to 
push herself forward in unseemly counsel, or use the influence 
which she so largely possessed for any weak or sinful purpose. 
Some, however, would have found it difficult to preserve their 
humility and meekness, situated as was Sarai. A coarser and 
narrower mind’ would have prided herself on the promises made 
her husband, imagining there must be some superlative merit, 
either in herself or Abram, to be so singled out by the'JEternal. 
There is no pride so dangerous and subtle as spiritual pride, no 
sin more likely to gain dominion in the early stages of religion 
— none so disguised, and so difficult to be discovered and 
rooted out. But in Sarai there was none of this ; not a particle 
of pride, even at a time when, of all others, she might have been 
almost justified in feeling it. She was, indeed, blessed in a 
husband whose exalted, yet domestic and affectionate character 
must ever have strengthened, guided, and cherished hers ; but 
it is not always the most blessed and distinguished woman who 
attends the most faithfully to her domestic duties, and preserves 
unharmed and untainted that meekness and integrity which is 
her greatest charm. 

Abram’s warlike expedition w T as the only one in whicn his 
wife did not accompany him. With what joy she must have 
w elcomed her warrior lord ! How gratefully must her loving 
heart have delighted to ponder on his magnanimity, in going 
instantly to the rescue of his weak and little grateful nephew ; — 
on his courage — his success ; and yet more on his noble refusal 


50 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


of at gifts from the king of Sodom, lest the glory ohould be taken 
from the Lord, and any mortal should say, “I have made 
Abram rich.” We dwell with delight on the stirring records of 
chivalry ; and it is right we should do so, for the study of all 
honorable, unselfish, and unworldly deeds must do us good ; 
but where shall we find, in the whole history of chivalry, an 
instance of such perfect nobility and magnanimity, unstained by 
one action from which mind or heart could revolt, as in the only 
warlike expedition of Abram ? It was indeed enough for a 
woman to glory in : and, though nothing is said, for the record 
of Moses is too important to descend to the thoughts and feel- 
ings of woman, we may well imagine the grateful and rejoicing 
feelings of Sarai, as she welcomed her husband home — forget- 
ting all the pangs of parting and loneliness of separation, in the 
triumph and delight of such a meeting. 

It was after these things, that we have the first allusion to 
the patriarch’s being childless. And by the words it which the 
Lord addressed him — “ Fear not, Abram, I am thy shield, and 
exceeding great reward,” we are led to suppose that some 
anxious thoughts, and perhaps doubts, natural to humanity, 
were occupying his mind. We, weak and frail as himself, 
might exclaim, What, still doubting, still fearing, when he has 
had so many proofs of the Eternal’s providence and care ! But 
God, whose “ thoughts are not as our thoughts,” instead of 
reproving , addresses him in terms of the tenderest love and 
encouragement, for He knew the nature of His creatures, and 
that faith could not be perfectly attained without years of 
watchfulness and prayer ; that if it were, man would cease to 
be man, and this life be no longer what it was intended — a life 
of trial. Abram’s instant reply reveals the painful thoughts 
which had engrossed him : — “ Lord God, what wilt thou give 
me ? seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this 
Eliezer of Damascus. Behold, to me thou hast given no seed, 
and lo, one born in my house is mine heir.” God had promised 
that the land should be his and his seed's , but Abram in sorrow 
beheld years pass, and still he had no child. Sarai had lono- 
passed the age when, humanly speaking, she could be a mother, 
it was much more natural — truly pious and faithful as he was 
—that Abram should be harassed with contradictory fears and 
doubts, than that he should have had none. God had promised, 
but how was that promise to be fulfilled l — unless, indeed, not 


PERIOD I. SARAH. 


5 ) 


ins own child, but “ one bom in his house” was to be his destined 
heir. This appeared perhaps the most probable, though it was 
painfully disappointing ; and to soothe this fear and remove it 
the Lord addressed him as we have said. The gracious and 
most blessed promise directly followed — that not one born in 
his house, but his own son should be his heir; and, bidding him 
look up at the stars — as countless and numberless they gemmed 
the clear, bright heavens — promised, that “ so should his seed 
be.” And then it was, that — all of doubt and mist and fear 
dissolving in the heart of the patriarch, before the words of the 
Lord, as snow before the sun — he believed . and that pure 
faith was accounted to him as righteousness. How blessed 
are those words ! In every station of life, however tried, and 
sad, and mourning, and deprived of all power to serve the Lord 
as our hearts dictate, we may yet believe, and Faith is still 
accounted righteousness. 

On the glorious prophetic vision which followed when the sun 
went down, we may not linger, as it will take us too far from 
the subject of our narrative. 

Great must have been Sarai’s joy when this gracious promise 
was made known to her. If to Abram the being childless was 
a source of deep regret, it must have been still more so to her. 
Loving and domestic, as her whole history proves she was, how 
often may she have yearned to list the welcome cry of infancy ; 
to feel one being look up to her for protection and love, and 
call her by that sweet name — Mother. But this joyful antici- 
pation could only have been of short duration. Sarai, as is 
woman’s nature, in all probability imagined the fulfilment 
would immediately follow the promise. The most difficult of 
all our spiritual attainments is to wait for the Lord : to believe 
still, through long months, perhaps years, of anticipation and 
disappointment, that as He has said it, so it will be, so it must be, 
though our finite wisdom cannot pronounce the when. Did the 
Eternal fulfil His gracious promises on the instant, where would 
be the trial of our faith, and of our confidence and constancy in 
pi ayer ? 

Finding still there was no appearance of her becoming a 
mother, we are led to suppose, by the events which follow, that 
all Sarai’s joyous anticipations turned into gloomy fears, not 
merely from the belief that she herself would not be blessed 
with a child, but that Abram mi<rht. as was and is the custom 
3 


52 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


of Eastern nations, take another wife ; an idea excited, perhaps 
by the recollection that her name had not been mentioned & 
the destined mother of the promised seed, but precisely the 
most painful which could find entrance in a heart affectionate 
and faithful as her own. To prevent this misfortune, and yet 
to further (as she supposed) the will of the Eternal, Sarai had 
recourse to human means. 

All women in her position, and influenced as she was by the 
manners and customs of the East, would have both felt and 
acted as she did, but few, we think, would have waited so long. 
It was ten years after Abram had left Egypt to fix his residence 
in Canaan, before Hagar became his wife. The sepuration 
of himself and Lot appears to have taken place in the first 
year after their settlement in Canaan, the expedition against the 
kings in the second or third year following. And we are 
expressly told, that it was soon after these occurrences that the 
Lord appeared unto the patriarch, and promised him an heir in 
his own child ; the Hebrew word, in* (after), signifying, accord- 
ing to Rashi, that the event about to be related took place soon after 
the period of the former narration ; but when a long 'period has 
intervened, the expression is used.* 

According to this reckoning, then, full five, or at the very 
least three, years must have elapsed between the promise made 
to Abram and his taking Hagar, at Sarai’s own request, to be 
his wife ; and few women would have beheld year after year 
pass, each year increasing the improbability of her becoming a 
mother, and yet so believed as to adopt no human means for 
the furtherance of her wishes. In perusing and reflecting on 
the blessings promised, and revelations made to the favored 
servants of the Lord, we are apt to suppose that their lives were 
preserved from all trouble, all trial of delay, from the fearful 
sickness of anticipation disappointed, and hope deferred; whereas, 
a more intimate study of the holy Scriptures would convince us, 
that though indeed most spiritually blessed, their mortal lives 
were not more exempt from labor, and all the sorrows proceed- 
ing from human emotions, than our own. We only see those 
periods on which the broad light of sunshine falls. The darkei 


* Sec “ The Sacred Scriptures, Hebrew a”d English,” translated >) 
the Rev. D A l)e Sola, &c Note to verse 1 of chap. xvi. 


PERIOD I. SiRAH. 


58 


shades of human doubt, the often supposed blighting of hope 
the struggles and terrors of the spirit alternating with the resl 
and confidence which it sometimes enjoys ; these we see not, 
and, therefore, pronounce them unknown to our forefathers ; 
whereas, did we examine more closely, we should not find 
severer trials in our own lives than in theirs : nor cease to 
believe, for a single moment, that the God who guided them 
through the dark shadows of human trials, and strengthened 
them with the light of llis presence, does not equally guide 
and reveal Himself to us. 

The first human evidence that Sarai’s scheme would be pro- 
ductive of vexation and sorrow, as well as of jo}% was her 
disappointment with regard to Hagar’s continued humility and 
submission. Forgetful that it was to her mistress, humanly 
speaking, she owed the privileges now hers, the Egyptian so far 
forgot herself, as to feel and make manifest that Sarai “was 
despised in her eyes.” Alas, how mournfully does that brief 
sentence breathe of woman’s fallen nature ! How apt are we to 
exalt ourselves for imaginary superiority — to look down on those 
who have served us, when God has bestowed on us privileges 
of which they are deprived. We forget, often through thought- 
lessness, that those very things of which we are so proud, come 
not from ourselves, but from Him who might equally have 
vouchsafed them to others. We may not indeed have the same 
incitement to pride and presumption as Hagar, but have we 
r.ever despised others for the want of those accomplishments, 
those advantages, that beauty, and other gifts from God, which 
we ourselves may possess ? Aye, sometimes, though we trust 
such emotions are rare as they are sad, the parents who have 
toiled and labored to give us advantages of dress and education 
far above what they possessed themselves — the elder sister, who 
is contented and rejoiced to remain in the background, that 
younger and fairer ones, whom she loves with almost a mother’s 
iove, may come forward — the homely and older-fashioned aunt, 
to whom, perhaps, a sister’s orphan family owe their all — these 
are the beings whom the young and thoughtless but too otter, 
secretly despise, as if their superior advantages had come from 
themselves, not from God, through loving relatives and friends. 

And this was the case with Hagar. A superficial reading of 
the Bible often causes Sarai to be most unjustly blamed for undue 
harshness. We think only of Hagar’s wanderings in the wilder 


54 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


ness, and pity her as cruelly treated, and suppose, that as the 
Most High relieved her through His angel, she had never been 
in any wav to blame. Now, though to sympathize with the 
sorrowing and afflicted be one of our purest and best feelings, it 
must not so blind us as to prevent our doing justice to the inflic- 
tor of that affliction. We candidly avow, that until lately we too 
thought Sarai harsh and unjust, and rather turned from than 
admired her character: but we have seen the injustice of 
this decision, and, therefore, without the smallest remaining pre- 
judice, retract it altogether : retract it, simply because the words 
of the angel are quite sufficient proof that Hagar had been wrong, 
and Sarai’s chastisement just, or he would not have commanded 
her, as Sarai’s bondwoman , to return and submit herself to her 
mistress’s power, without any reservation whatever. 

It must indeed have been a bitterly painful disappointment to 
Sarai, that instead of receiving increased gratitude and affection 
from one whom she had so raised and cherished, she was despised 
with an insolence that, unless checked, might bring discord and 
misery in a household which had before been so blessed with 
peace and love. Sarai’s was not a character to submit tamely to 
ingratitude. There was neither coldness nor indifference about 
her. In no part of the Bible, either in character or precept, dc 
we perceive the necessity or the merit of that species of cold 
indifference, which is by some well-meaning religious persons 
supposed to be the self-control and pious forgiveness of injuries 
most acceptable to God. The Patriarchal and Jewish history 
alike prove, that natural feelings were not to be trampled upon. 
The Hebrew code was formed by a God of love for the nature of 
man, not angels — formed so as to be obeyed , not to be laid aside 
as impracticable. The passions and feelings of the East were 
very different to those of the calmer and colder North ; and 
nowhere in Holy Writ are we told that those feelings and emotions 
must be annihilated. Subdued and guided indeed, as must be 
the consequence of a true and strict adherence to the law of God, 
and impartial study of His word ; but in the sight of a God of 
love, indifference can never be, and never was, religion. 

Yet even this, an affair of feeling entirely between herself and 
Hagar, could not urge Sarai to any line of conduct unauthorized 
by her husband. Naturally indignant, she complained to him< 
perhaps, too, with some secret fear that Hagar, favored so much 
above herself by the hope of her giving him a son, might be 


PERIOD I. SARAH 


55 


unduly justified and protected. But it was not so. Abram’s 
answei at once convinced her that Hagar had not taken her place ; 
nay, that though Abram could not do otherwise than feel tender- 
ness and kindness towards her, he at once recognised Sarai’s 
supremacy, both as his wife and Hagar’s mistress, and bade her 
“ do with her what seemeth good to thee.” We have so many 
proofs of Abram’s just, affectionate, and forgiving character, that 
we may fully believe he would never have said this, if he had 
not been convinced that it was no unjust accusation on the part 
of Sarai. He knew, too, that she was not likely to inflict moie 
punishment than was deserved, particularly on a favorite slave ; 
and, therefore, it was with his full consent “ Sarai afflicted her, 
and she fled from her presence.’’ 

Whatever the nature of this affliction, it could not have been 
very severe — neither pain nor restraint — for Hagar had the 
power to fly. Reproof to an irritable and disdainful mind is often 
felt as intolerable, and given too, as it no doubt was, with 
severity, and at a time when Hagar felt exalted and superior to 
all around her, even to her mistress, her proud spirit urged flight 
instead of submission, and not till addressed by the voice of the 
angel did those rebellious feelings subside. 

There was no mistaking the angelic voice, and his first words 
destroyed the proud dreams which she had indulged. “ Hagar, 
Sarai’s bondwoman 1” he said, and the term told her in the sight 
of God she w'as still the same, “ whence earnest thou, and 
whither art thou going ?” It was not because he knew not 
that he thus spoke. The messengers of the Lord need no 
enlightenment on the affairs of men, but their questions are 
adapted to the nature of men, to awaken them to consciousness, 
to still the tumult of human passion, and by clear and simple 
questioning compel a clear and true reply. Had his command 
to return been given without preparation, Hagar’s obedience 
would have been the effect of fear, not conviction. But those 
simple questions, “ whence earnest thou ? whither art thou going ?” 
startled her from the tumultuous emotions of rebellion and pre» 
sumption. Whence had she come ? From a happy, loving 
home, where she had been the favorite of an indulgent and 
gentle mistress ; a home which would speedily be to her yet 
dearer, as the birthplace of her child ; that child who was to be 
the supposed heir to her master and all his sainted privileges : 
from friends, from companions, all whom she had loved : an/ 


56 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


she had left them ! And whither was she going ? How might 
she answer when she knew not ? Was she about to resign all 
of affection, privilege, joy, to wander in the wilderness, helpless 
and alone ? How idle and impotent now seemed her previous 
feelings. Those simple questions had flashed back light on her 
darkened heart, and humbled her at once; and simply and 
truthfully she answered, “I flee from the presence of my mistress 
Sarai thus meekly acknowledging that Sarai was still her 
mistress, and that her derision had indeed been wrong. Reproof, 
therefore, followed not ; but the angel bade her, “ Return to thy 
mistress, and submit thyself to her power.” And, perceiving 
that her repentance was sincere, and would lead to obedience, 
he continued graciously to promise that her seed should be 
multiplied, so that it should not be numbered for multitude ; 
that her son should bear a name which would ever remind her 
that God had heard her affliction, with other promises concern- 
ing that son, yet none which might lead her to the deceitful 
belief that he would be Abram’s promised seed. 

Inexpressibly consoled, in the midst of her bitter self-reproach, 
and convinced, by his supernatural voice and disappearance, that 
it was indeed an angel direct from the Lord with whom she had 
spoken, it is evident from the context, although not there men- 
tioned, that Hagar must have unhesitatingly obeyed, and returned 
to her mistress — convinced of her error — submissive and re- 
pentant, and been by Sarai received with returning confidence 
and full forgiveness. 

In due course of time the promise was fulfilled, and Hagar, to 
the great joy of Abram, had a son, whom Abram called Ishmael, 
thus proving that Hagar must have imparted the visit of the 
angel, and his command as to the name of her son. 

Before we proceed, we would entreat our younger readers to 
pause one moment on the simple facts we have related ; and sc 
take it to their hearts, that the first words of the angel may 
oecome theirs as well as Hagar’s. We have not indeed the 
direct communings with the messengers of the Lord, as is recorded 
in the Bible ; but we are not left unguided and unquestioned. 
We have still an angelic voice within us, that, would we but 
encourage it to speak — would we but listen to it — can, even as 
the angel’s, still the wild torrent of passion, awaken us to our 
neglected duty, and lead us, repentant and sorrowing, to those 
whom we may have offended. God has not left us without His 


PERIOD I. SARAH. b 7 

tvitness. The voice of conscience may be to us what angel 
visits were to our ancestors of old. There is no period of our 
lives in which it is wholly lost ; but in youth it is strongest and 
most thrilling. In youth it is, that we awake from the (often) 
stagnant sleep of earlier years ; — we aw y ake to a consciousness of 
bright, glowing, beautiful existence ; — we become conscious of a 
deep yearning after the good , and at the same time sorrowfully 
feel, that it is not quite as easy to attain as we believed it. As 
our emotions and feelings spring into life, so does conscience. 
We become aware of a peculiar thrilling sense of joy, when we 
have accomplished good, either in conquering ourselves — in 
giving up a selfish inclination — or in showing kindness, affection, 
and respect to others. There is a glowing sense of joy, when 
conscience tells us we have done well, unlike the joy proceeding 
from any other cause ; and as it approves, with an angel voice 
that will be heard, so does it disapprove. We may stifle it — 
we may refuse to listen to its still small tones — yet we cannot 
shake off the depression and the sadness which it leaves. We 
may refuse to know wherefore we thus feel ; but it is conscience 
still. How much better, then, to permit its having voice and 
power, and, as it dictates, do — to encourage it at times to speak, 
and ever keep its silent watch, for we need it, oh ! how powerfully 
we need it. How fearful is our responsibility if we permit it to 
lie unused ; for more strongly than aught else does it breathe 
our approval, or our condemnation, in the sight of the Lord. Is 
there one amongst us that has not felt, at one time or other, 
emotions similar to those of Ilagar — anger at reproof, scorn of 
those who reprove, rebellion against their dictates ; and we would 
fly from their presence with wrath at our hearts, and rebellion 
on our lips ; and at such times does the voice of conscience never 
steal over us with question?, similar to these ? “ Whence comest 
thou ? Whither wouldst thou flee ? What wouldst thou do V 
startling us from wrath, often and often into a burst of passionate 
and self-reproachful, though, as yet, only half- repentant tears. 
And when that passion in a degree is stilled — when affection and 
reason softly and pleadingly resume their sway, does not the angel 
voice bid us inso “ return” unto those whom we have offended ? 
.submit to their control ? It is wisest, best, though our wayward 
spirits shrink from it, proud of their own will, desirous of undue 
freedom. And at such times, oh ! well it is for us, now and here- 
after, if, even as Hagar, we return and submit, and thus 


58 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


acknowledge the power of that inward voice ! Its angelic whispei 
will come to us again ; we need not fear them, nor shrink from a 
lonely path — we have within us the “ angel of the Lord.” But 
those who hear yet refuse to heed, drowning that heavenly 
whisper by plunging anew into gaiety and pleasure, or stifling 
it by unwonted industry, are exposing themselves to distant but 
untold of sorrows. It will, indeed, be long ere conscience 
becomes so silenced as not to intrude, but she will at length ; 
and then, when, in agony of spirit, we wake from our vain dream, 
and would give worlds, if we had them, to feel as we have felt — - 
to hear once more the voice of conscience thrilling and directing 
as in happier years — to be awake to the consciousness of our 
faults, that we might correct and subdue them — and feel once 
more the glowing approval of our strivings after good, oh ! how 
agonizing must be the conviction — it is we who have spurned, 
neglected, and so silenced the angel of the Lord, that it must be 
a long, long, and weary interval of pain, and toil, and watching, 
ere we may list those sweet low spiritual tones again. Better, 
far better, the momentary pain and humility of acknowledgment 
and submission. Better, far better, the too tender conscience, 
giving pain, in some cases apparently unnecessarily, than its 
silence and stagnation ; for it must one day awake, and dreadful 
will be that waking. To obtain this blessed influence — to feel 
that to us is sent, as to our ancestors, “ the angel of the Lord” — 
we have but to study the word of God and ourselves. It may cost 
us at first many sad and weary hours — many bitter tears — and 
many a secret pang ; for it is hard so to know ourselves as to 
see faults and failings which others see not. — It is hard to restrain 
the too frequent indulgence of favorite pleasures, because wc 
know they will do us harm. — It is hard sometimes to perform a 
disagreeable, nay a painful duty, only because we feel we ought, 
though our friends see not the necessity ; — hard, when friends 
approve, for our hearts to disapprove ; and all this we must 
encounter, would we study ourselves and God’s word, till our 
hearts become shrines for his guiding angel. But oh ! and 
depressing as alt this may seem, it is but a grain in the balance 
compared to the deep thrilling joy which is its accompaniment. 
Those who have once felt the glow of approving conscience— 
the strength, encouragement, consolation, hope, which it gives 
when all around is desolate and dark, who feel that, hand-in-hand 
with faith and prayer, it is leading us safely and blessedly through 


PERIOD I. SARAH. 59 

the slony paths of earth, even through the dark valley of death, 
up to the glowing and immortal light of heaven, will welcome 
even its severest pang to call it theirs, and hail it as, indeed, the 
angel of the Lord. 

It may be that Sarai’s correction of Hagar was unduly harsh, 
although we have no warrant in Scripture for so believing ; but 
it is evident, as there is no further mention of contention and 
disagreement between them, that she received her submission 
with gentleness, and restored her to favor. Tt is well when 
forgiveness is thus recorded : many and many a young meek 
spirit would obey the voice of the angel and return, in humility 
and love, could they but be sure that submission would be gently 
md lovingly received ; and shrink from it only because the 
shilling reception, the uttered but not felt reconciliation, falls upon 
their still quivering hearts with a pang and degradation which 
they feel that as yet they cannot bear. The spirit of that healing 
and consoling love which has its birth in religion, must guide both 
the offended and the offender, or reconciliation never can be 
complete ; nor the latter be securely and convincingly led back 
to that better path to which the angel points. The pang of 
unrequited confidence, chilled affection, and all the bitterness of 
unnecessary degradation, will be stronger at first than the 
approving glow of conscience ; while a contrary reception, even 
though it may heighten the pang of self-reproach, will soothe 
and encourage, for the inward voice whispers — we have done 
well ; and, from that moment, the heavenly messenger assumes 
her mild dominion in the heart, never to be lured thence again. 

For thirteen years Abram and Sarai must have looked upon 
Ishmael as the promised seed ; for though, not actually so said, 
there was neither spiritual sign nor human hope of the patriarch 
having any other child. At the end of that period, however, 
the Most High again appeared unto Abram, proclaiming Him- 
self as the Almighty, — a fit introduction to the event He was 
about to foretell ; and bidding His favored servant, “ Walk 
before me, and be thou perfect,” perfect in trust, in faith, with- 
out any regard to human probabilities, for, as Almighty God, 
all things were possible with Him. The name of the patriarch 
was then changed, as a sign of the many nations over whom he 
was appointed father — the land again promised him — and the 
covenant appointed which was to mark his descendants as the 
chosen of the Lord, the everlasting inheritors of Canaan ; and 


50 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


bear witness, to untold-of ages, of the truth of the Lord’s word, 
and the election of His people. This proclaimed and com 
manded, the Eternal commenced Ilis information of the miracle 
He was about to perform, by desiring Abraham to call his wife 
no longer Sarai but Sarah mb — a change which oui 
ancient fathers suppose to mean the same as from Abram tc 
Abraham. “ Sarai, signifying a lady or princess in a restricted 
sense, imported that she was a lady, or princess, to Abram 
only ; whereas the latter name signifies princess or lady abso- 
lutely, indicating that she would thus be acknowledged by 
many, even as Abraham was to become the hither of many 
nations.”* A meaning perfectly reconcilable with the verse 
which follows : “And I will bless her, and give thee a son also 
of her : yea, I will bless her, so that she shall be a mother oj 
nations ; kings of people shall be of her.” She was, therefore, 
no longer a princess over Abraham’s household, but a princess 
in royal rank, from whom kings should descend. Joy must 
have been the first emotion of Abraham’s heart at this miracu- 
lous announcement, mingled with a feeling of wonder and 
astonishment how such a thing could be; but then, in his 
peculiarly affectionate heart, came the thought of his first-born 
Ishmael, and with earnestness he prayed, “ Oh ! that Ishmael 
might live before thee !” And though the Eternal could not 
grant this prayer, for the seed of Abraham, from whom His 
chosen people would spring, must be of pure and unmixed birth, 
He yet, with compassionating tenderness, soothed the father’s 
anxious love, by the gracious promise that, though Sarah’s child 
must be the seed with whom His covenant should be established, 
yet Ishmael also should be blessed and multiplied exceedingly, 
and become, even as Isaac, the father of a great nation. “ And 
for Ishmael I have also heard thee.” How blessed an encou- 
ragement for us to pour forth our prayers unto the Lord, proving, 
how consolingly, that no prayer is offered in vain ; for if He 
cannot grant as our infinite wishes would dictate, He will yet 
hear us — yet fulfil our prayer far better for our welfare, and the 
welfare of our beloved ones, than our own wishes could have 
accomplished, had they been granted to the full. 

The acceptance of the covenant throughout Abraham’s house* 

* See note to Gen. xvii 15, t n the Rev. D. A. Do Sola’s translation cf 
the Bible. 


PERIOD I.— SARAH. 


61 


bold, and the change in her own name, must, of course, have 
been imparted by Abraham to his wife, with the addition of the 
startling promise, that she too, even at her advanced age, should 
bear a son. Yet by her behavior, when the promise was 
repeated in the following chapter, it would appear that, though 
informed of it, she had dismissed it from her mind as a thing 
impossible. Accustomed to regard Ishmael as the only seed of 
Abraham — to suppose her scheme had been blessed, more par- 
ticularly as she had never been named before as the mother of 
the chosen seed — the hope of being so had long since euti-ely 
faded; and, not having attained the simple questionless faith 
of her husband, she, in all probability, dismissed the the Bght, as 
recalling too painfully those ardent hopes and wishes, which she 
had with such difficulty previously subdued. Engaged, as was 
her wont, in her domestic duties, she was one day interrupted 
3y the hasty entrance of her husband, requiring her “ quickly 
to prepare three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make it 
into cakes.” Patriarchal hospitality was never satisfied by com- 
mitting to hirelings only the fit preparations for a hearty wel- 
come. We see either fc'arah herself making the desired cakes, 
or closely superintending her domestics in doing so ; and the 
patriarch hastening, in the warmth of his hospitality, himself to 
fetch a calf from the herd, to give it to a young man to dress it, 
though he had abundance of servants around him to save him 
the exertion. Yet both Abraham and Sarah were of the nobility 
of the Eternal’s creating. He had raised them above theii 
fellows, and bestowed on them the patent of an aristocracy, with 
which not one of the nations could vie, for it came from God 
Himself. He had changed their names to signify their royal 
claims — to make them regarded in future ages as noble ances- 
tors of a long line of prophets, kings, princes, and nobles ; and 
there was a refinement, a nobleness, a magnanimity of character 
in both the patriarch and his wife, which, breathing through 
their very simplicity, betrayed their native aristocracy, and 
marked them of that princely race which has its origin in the 
favor and election of the King of kings. The primitive sim- 
plicity of our first fathers generally impresses the mind with the 
mistaken idea of their being simply farmers or agriculturists, 
Doth of which they certainly were, but not these alone, as sup- 
posed in the present acceptation of the term. They were 
princes and nobles, not only in their mental superiority but in 


62 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


their immense possessions — in their large and well ordered ho^so 
holds, in the power they possessed both in their own establish- 
ments and in the adjoining* lands, and in the respect and sub- 
mission ever paid them by the nations with whom they might 
have held intercourse. Abraham was never addressed save aa 
“ My Lord,” either by his own domestics or other nations ; thus 
acknowledged as superior, and of noble if not royal rank, by 
those who could scarcely be supposed to understand why he 
was so, save by the outward signs of landed possession and large 
establishment. Those who think so much of noble descent and 
princely connexion, would do well to remember this — that 
impoverished, scattered, chastised, for a “ little moment,” as we 
are — yet, that if we are children and descendants of Abraham 
— Israelites not only in seeming but in heart — we are 
descended from the aristocracy of the Lord — from a higher and 
nobler race than even Gentile kings may boast ; a privilege and 
glory of which no circumstance, no affliction, no persecution can 
deprive us — ours, through all and every event of life, unless 
we cast it from us by the dark deed of forsaking, for ambition, 
or gold, or power, the banner of our blessed faith — the religion 
of our God. 

Yet noble, even princely, as were Abraham and Sarah, it 
was no sign of rank, with them, to be cold and restrained by 
false artificial laws. In the Bible, nobility was nature and heart , 
simplicity and benevolence, cordiality and warmth ; no cold- 
ness, no indifference, no folding up the affections and the 
impulses of feeling in the icy garment of pride and fashion, 
which so cften turns to selfishness, and so utterly prevents all 
of benevolence and social good. Abraham knew not, at his 
first invitation, the rank or mission of his visitors. His address 
was one of the heart's respect , not the mere politeness of the 
lip ; and the warmth of his welcome would not permit of his 
sitting idly down while hirelings prepared their meal — nay, we 
find that, even while they sat down to partake of it, their host 
stood, — a mark of profound respect, which a further considera- 
tion of their majestic aspect prompted, by the supposition that 
they were more than ordinary' mortals. 

Sarah joined not her husband or his guests. The modest 
and dignified customs of the East prevented all intrusion, or 
even the wish to intrude. Unless particularly asked for, the 
place of the Eastern and .Jewish wife was in the r retirement of 


PERIOD I. SARAH. 


(53 


home ; not from any inferiority of rank, or servitude of station, 
but simply because their inclination so prompted. The strangers 
might have business with Abraham, which, if needed, he would 
impart to her ; there was no occasion for her to come forward. 
But, while seated in the inner tent, engaged in her usual 
avocations, she heard her own name, “ Where is Sarah, thy 
wife ?” and her husband’s reply, “ She is in the tent,” followed 
by words that must indeed have sounded strange and improba- 
ble, “ Sarah, thy wife, shall bear a son yet, improbable as 
they might have seemed, there is no excuse for the laugh of 
incredulity with which they were received. Already prepared 
by the previous promise of the Lord, the words should at 
once have revealed the heavenly nature of those who spake, 
and been heard with faith and thankfulness ; but Sarah thought 
only of the human impossibility. Strange as it is, that such 
unbelief should be found in the beloved partner of Abraham, 
yet her laugh proves that even she was not exempt from the 
natural feelings of mortality — the looking to human means and 
human possibilities alone ; forgetting that with God all things 
are possible. Yet, to us, the whole of this incident is consoling. 
It proves that even Sarah was not utterly free from human 
infirmities ; and yet that the Eternal, through His angel, 
deigned graciously to reprove , not to chastise. It proves that 
God has compassion on the nature of His erring children ; for 
he knows their weakness. Man would have been wroth with 
the laugh of scorn, and withdrawn his intended favor ; but 
“ the Lord said unto Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah laugh, 
saying, Shall I, who am old, indeed bear a child ? Is anything 
too mighty for the Lord ? At the time appointed I will return 
unto thee, and Sarah shall indeed have a son.” The gracious 
mildness of the rebuke — the blessed repetition of the promise 
— must, to one so affectionate as Sarah, have caused the bitter- 
est reproach ; but, weakly listening to fear instead of repentance, 
she denied her fault, seeking thus mistakenly to extenuate it. 
But He said, “ Nay, but thou didst laugh,” proving that her 
innermost thoughts were known ; and, silenced at once, left to 
the solitude of her own tent, for Abraham accompanied his 
guests on the road to Sodom, we know quite enough of Sarah’s 
character to rest satisfied that repentance and self-abasement 
for unbelief, mingled with, and hallowed the burst of rejoicing 
thankfulness with which she must have looked forward to an 


34 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


event so full of bliss to her indi\ idually, and so blessed a reve- 
lation of the Lord’s deep love for Abraham and herself. Nearb 
twenty years had passed since the first promise of an heir in his 
own child had been given. Years, long, full of incident ana 
feeling, seeming in their passing an interval long enough for the 
utter forgetfulness of the promise, save as it was supposed 
fulfilled in the birth of Ishmael ; but now, in the retrospect, the 
promise flashed back with a vividness, a brightness, as if scarce 
a single year had passed ere it had been given : and Sarah 
must have felt self-reproached in the midst of her joy, that she 
had not waited, had not trusted, had not believed unto the end 
And many a one, ere life has closed, will feel as she did ; not 
indeed, from the same cause — but often and often a prayer has 
been offered up, a promise given from the word of God, and 
both have been forgotten, neglected, mistrusted, through long 
weary years — as vainly prayed and vainly answered — and 
yet, ere life has closed, recalled as by a flash of sudden light, 
by the divine answer to the one, and gracious fulfilment of the 
other. 

Before the birth of Isaac, however, Abraham and his family 
once more removed their dwelling, partly, it may be supposed, 
to fulfil the words of the Lord previously spoken : “ Arise, 
walk through the land, in the length of it and the breadth of 
it, for I will give it unto thee and partly from the desolate 
appearance and poisonous vapors of the once beautiful vale of 
Sodom, and in consequence of the cessation of travellers, to 
whom Abraham had so delighted to show hospitality. We 
shall pass lightly over the next event in the life of Sarah, having 
already made our remarks on a similar occurrence. The fault 
of the patriarch in again passing his wife for his sister, was 
indeed much greater than it had been at the first. He had 
now no longer the excuse of not sufficiently knowing the ways 
of the Lord to trust in Him, even in the midst of those dangers 
incidental to mankind, yet seeming too trivial for the interference 
of the Most High. He had had nearly thirty years’ experience 
that he was in truth the chosen servant, and the well-beloved 
of thi Lord — that there was not an event in his life which had 
not been ordered and guided by a special providence ; and he 
ought to have known that this danger, as every other, would 
be overruled. Yet, while we regret that this incomprehensible 
weakness should overshadow the beautiful character of our 


PERIOD I. S A K a H , 


65 


great ancestor, we may not condemn : for, at this distance of 
time, and complete change in manners and customs, it is 
impossible for us to know the temptation he may have had to 
act as he did, or the extent of danger to which he was exposed. 
The most truly pious, the most experienced in religion, have 
often to mourn their “ iniquities in holy things.” The painful 
struggle is always to realize faith, to trust without one doubt, 
and more particularly in the smaller trials of life, which they 
deem toe trivial for the notice, compassion, or interference of the 
Eternal. Nor can even proofs of a superintending providence 
always conquer the weakness of human nature. In this world, 
the likeness of God will at times be completely hidden in the 
earthly shell, however it may stand forth at others, as if naught 
of clay could dull it more. And this was the case with Abra- 
ham, who, though the beloved of the Lord, was yet human , 
and liable to all the weaknesses and frailties of human nature. 
We are not therefore to condemn, and so withdraw our admira- 
tion of his great and most consolingly beautiful character, 
because in two instances he falls short of our ideas of perfection 
— but rather thank God that in His Word human nature is 
recorded as it is , simply that we may not despair. It is enough 
for us, in this part of our narrative, to notice that our gracious 
God demands no more of His creatures than He knows they 
can perform ; that Abraham’s faulty weakness in this one 
instance, could not blot from the recollection of the Lord his 
pure and simple faith in every other ; and that he permitted 
all that occurred in the kingdom of Gerar to make manifest, 
alike to Abraham and the nations, His continued watchfulness 
and miraculous interposition in favor of those whom He loves 
— His power to protect them from all harm, and also, that 
nothing was too wonderful for Him. Sarah had imagined she 
was too old to enjoy the felicity of becoming a mother — too 
old in any way to excite admiration, save to the beloved hus- 
band of her youth ; and, ignorant that her beauty had been 
super naturally renewed, neglected to assume the veil, which was 
worn by all Eastern women dwelling in towns. This explains 
Abimelech’s present of a “covering for the eyes,” and the 
words, “ thus she was reproved,” or warned, that her beauty 
subjected her to as much danger as had been the case in her 
vouth. 

Miraculously protected by the Eternal, and publicly vindicated 


56 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


from all dishonor by the King of Gerar, Sarah and hef 
husband continued to dwell in Abimelech’s dominions, some 
few miles to the south of Gerar ; a place afterwards called 
Beer-Shebang, or Well of the Oath, from the covenant of peace 
there made between the patriarch and the king. Here it was 
that at the appointed time “ God visited Sarah as He had said 
and the promised seed — the child of rejoicing — Isaac waa 
born. What must have been the emotions of Sarah on behold- 
ing him ? Not alone the bliss of a mother ; but that in 
him the infant claimer of a love and jcy which she had 
never so felt before, she beheld a visible and palpable manifesta- 
tion of the wonderful power and unchanging love of the 
Most High God. Devoted, as Sarah had been, to the service 
and love of the Lord, how inexpressibly must those emo- 
tions have been heightened as she gazed upon her babe, and 
held him to her bosom as her own , her granted child ! To 
those who really love the Lord, joy is as dear, as bright, 
as close a link between the heart and its God, as grief is 
to more fallen natures. We find the hymn of rejoicing, the 
song of thanksgiving, always the vehicle in which the favored 
servants of the Lord poured forth their grateful adoration, 
thus proving that the thought of the beneficent Giver ever 
hallowed and sanctified the gift; and therefore we believe 
with our ancient fathers, that though not translated metrically, 
Sarah expressed her joy in a short hymn of thanksgiving. The 
peculiar idiom of the Hebrew text confirms this supposi- 
tion,* and we adopt it as most natural to the occasion. 
Her age had had no power, even before she became a mother, 
to dull her feelings, and her song of thanksgiving well expresses 
every emotion natural, not alone to the occasion, but to her 
peculiar situation. As a young mother, full of life, of senti- 
ment, of affection, she felt towards her babe — giving him 
his natural food from her own bosom — tending his infant 
years — guiding him from boyhood to youth — from youth 
to manhood, and lavishing on him the full tide of love which 
had been pent up so long. The very character of Isaac, as 
is afterwards displayed — meek, yielding, affectionate almost as a 
woman’s — disinclined to enterprise — satisfied with his heritage 
—all prove the influence which his mother had possessed, 


* See tne P D. A. Do Sola’s translation, and note lher#»o» 


PERIOD I. SARAH. 


6 ? 


v.d that his disposition was more the work of her hand than of 
his father’s. 

“ The child grew and was weaned,” Holy Writ proceeds 
to inform us ; “ and Abraham made a great feast the day 
Isaac was weaned,” — a feast of rejoicing that the Eternal 
had mercifully preserved him through the first epoch of 
his young existence. He was now three years old, if not more — 
for the women of the East, even now, do not wean their children 
till that age. The feast, however, which commenced in joy, 
was, for the patriarch, dashed with sorrow ere it closed. 
Educated with the full idea that he was his father’s heir — 
though the words of the angel before his birth gave no warrant 
for the supposition — to Ishmael and his mother, the birth 
of Isaac must have been a grievous disappointment. And we 
find the son committing the same fault as his mother previously 
had done — deriding, speaking disrespectfully of Sarah and her 
child. The youth of Ishmael, and Sarah’s request that the 
bond-woman might also be expelled, would lead to the supposi- 
tion that it was Hagar who had instigated the affront. The age 
of Sarah, and the decidedly superhuman birth of Isaac, must, to 
all but the patriarch’s own household, have naturally given rise 
to many strange and perhaps calumniating reports. In the 
common events of life all that is incomprehensible is either 
ridiculed, disbelieved, or made matter of scandal ; and, there- 
fore, in a case so uncommon as this, it is more than proba- 
ble reports very discreditable both to Sarah and Abraham were 
promulgated all around them. Hagar, indeed, and Ishmael 
must have known differently : — that it was the hand of God 
which worked, and therefore all things were possible; but 
it was to Ishmael’s interest to dispute or deny the legitimacy of 
Isaac ; and therefore it was not in human nature to neglect the 
opportunity. No other offence would have so worked on 
Sarah. VVe are apt to think more poetically than justly 
of this part of the Bible. Hagar and her young son, expelled 
from their luxurious and happy home, almost perishing in 
the desert from thirst, are infinitely more interesting objects 
of consideration and sympathy, than the harsh and jealous 
Sarah, who, for seemingly such tritling offence, demanded 
and obtained such severe retribution. 

We generally rest satisfied with one or two verges; whereas, 
did w r e look further and think deeper, our judgment would be 


38 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL.. 


different. In a mere superficial reading we acknowledge Saral 
does appear in rather an unfavorable light ; as if her love foi 
Isaac had suddenly narrowed and stagnated every other feeling; 
and, jealous of Ishmael’s influence over his father, she had 
determined on seizing the first opportunity for his expulsion. 
That this, however, is a wrong judgment is proved by the fact, 
that the Eternal Himself desires Abraham to hearken to the 
voice of Sarah in all that she shall say; for in Isaac was to be 
the promised seed, though of Ishmael al«o would He make a 
nation, because he was Abraham’s son. That Sarah’s advice 
was not to be displeasing to him, because of the lad and his 
mother. 

Now, had Sarah’s advice proceeded from an undue harsh- 
ness, a mean and jealous motive, the Most H'gh would, in His 
divine justice, have taken other means for the fulfilment of His 
decrees. He would not have desired His good and faithful 
servant to be so guided by an evil and suspicious tongue. 
There are times when we feel urged and impelled to speak that 
which we are yet conscious will be productive of pain and 
suffering to ourselves. All such impulses are of God ; and it 
must have been some such feeling which actuated Sarah, and 
compelled her to continue her solicitation for the expulsion of 
Hagar and Ishmael, even after the moment of anger was passed. 
We know that Hagar had ever been her favorite slave; it was 
impossible for one affectionate as was Sarah, to have regarded 
Ishmael as her son for thirteen or fourteen years and yet not 
have loved him, though of course with less intensity than his 
father. The birth of Isaac naturally revealed yet stronger emo- 
tions ; still Ishmael could not have been so excluded from her 
affections as to render her separation from him void of pain. 
And still she spoke, still urged the necessity, conscious all the 
time she was inflicting pain not only on her husband but on 
herself. This appears like contradiction ; but each one who has 
attentively studied the workings of his own heart, will not only 
feel but pronounce it truth. Anger caused the demand*: 
“ Expel this bondwoman and her son ; for the son of this bond- 
woman shall not inherit with my son, even with Isaac;” and 
calmer reflection continued to see the necessity. Abraham’s 
possessions were sufficient for the heritage of both his sons ; but 
as the course of nature was changed, and the younger, not the 
elder, was to be the heir of promise, confusion and discorc 


PERIOD 


. SARAH. 


69 


would have ensued, and the brothers continually have been al 
war. Sarah’s penetration appears to have discovered this ; and 
as it was necessary for Ishmael to form a separate establish- 
ment, it was an act of kindness, not of harshness, to let him 
depart with Hagar, instead of going forth alone. From her 
own feelings she now knew the whole extent of a mother’s love ; 
and therefore, though Ishmael had been the sole offender, and 
the only one whose claims were likely to clash with Isaac’s, she 
would not separate the mother from the son, and so urged 
Abraham to separate from both. 

There is something touchingly beautiful in .he patriarch’s 
love for his elder son, and yet his instant conquest of self at 
the word of the Lord. His deep affection had blinded him to 
the probable discomforts which might ensue from his sons 
remaining together. His gentle and affectionate nature shrank 
from the pang of separation, causing even displeasure against 
Sarah for the first time in their long and faithful intercourse. 
Yet when God spake there was neither complaint nor murmur, 
nor one word of supplication that the heavy trial might be 
averted from him. It was enough that the Most High had 
spoken ; and though all was dark before his son, to the fond 
anxious gaze of parental affection, he knew even from that 
darkness God could bring forth light, and would do so, for He 
had promised. 

We are sometimes surprised at the small provision with 
which Abraham enuowed his son at his departure. The riches 
of the patriarchs consisted of land, flocks, herds, and servants ; 
nothing which could easily be bestowed. Besides which, 
Ishmael w T as to become the ancestor of a nation, through the 
direct agency of the Lord , not from any provision made him by 
his earthly father. Had Abraham endowed him, the interposi- 
tion of the Eternal would not have been so clearly and unan- 
swerably demonstrated. There would have been many to have 
traced his riches and the princely rank of his descendants from 
the gifts and power of Abraham, and denied altogether any 
interposition of the Lord ; whereas, sent forth as he was, with 
nothing but sufficient provision to sustain him till he reached 
his appointed resting, it was impossible even for the greatest 
sceptic to trace his future prosperity and wealth to any earthly 
power alone. The bread and water must not be supposed aa 
meaning only what we now regard them. In the language of 


io 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


the Bible bread is used indiscriminately for every kind of food, 
and the bottle of water signifies a skinful, such being used by 
Eastern travellers even now, and containing much more than we 
imagine is comprised by the term “bottle.” Yet even these 
were to fail, that the miraculous power and compassionate love 
of the Eternal might still more startlingly be proved. It was 
as easy for the Most High to have guided Ishmael and his 
mother at once to their destined dwelling, as to try them as 
He did in the ordeal of alike physical and mental suflfering. 
But He chose the latter, at once to prove His love to them, and 
to give to future ages, through his unerring word, comfort in 
their darkest hours ; for as He relieved Hagar, so will He them. 
The God of the bondwoman is ours still ; no time, no change 
can part us from Him. 

The narrative of Hagar’s wanderings in the wilderness, hei 
maternal suffering and miraculous relief, is one of the most 
beautiful and most touching amongst the many beauties of the 
Bible. Hagar was not of Abraham’s race, but one of a heathen 
and benighted nation, a bondwoman and a wanderer, a weak 
and lonely female, exiled from a home of love, overwhelmed 
with anxious fears for her child, perhaps, too, with self-reproaches 
for the unguarded words which she encouraged her boy to 
speak, and which she regarded as the sole cause of her banish- 
ment ; yet was this poor sufferer the peculiar care of the great 
and mighty God. He caused the clouds of densest darkness to 
close around her — from them to bring forth the brightest, most 
enduring light. He deigned, by His angel, to speak comfort 
and hope, and even for her human wants provided the necessary 
aid. He did not guard from sorrow ; for it was not until “ the 
water was spent in the bottle, and she cast the child under one 
of the shrubs, and she went and sat down over against him, 
a good way off, for she said, Let me not see the death of the 
child ; and she sat over against him, and lifted up her voice 
and wept ” — not till her trial was thus at its height, that the 
angelic voice descended from heaven in such pitying and sym- 
pathizing accents : “ What aileth thee, O Hagar } Fear not, 
for God hath heard the voice of the lad whence he is. Arise, 
lift up the lad, and hold him in thine hand, for I will make him 
a great nation.” And the promise was fulfilled. 

The whole history of Hagar is fraught with the deepest com* 
fort* She was one of the many in individual character ; pos 


PERIOD I. SARAH. 


71 

sessing alike woman’s engaging and faulty characteristics : 
feeling and affectionate at one time, overbearing and insolent at 
another — loving Ishmael with impetuous and clinging love, 
which could not bear to see his supposed heritage become the 
property of another, though she knew it was the decree of God 
--reverencing and loving Abraham alike as her master and the 
father of her child, but unable always to preserve the submission 
and respect due to Sarah as her mistress and indulgent friend , 
for, though the mother of Abraham’s child, she was still Sarah’s 
maid ; — such was Hagar. Neither in character superior, nor in 
station equal, to the daughters of Israel now ; yet was she the 
peculiar charge of the Most High, and twice did He deign, in 
closest communion, to instruct and console. Her life had its 
trials, in no way inferior in severity or in deep suffering to the 
trials of the present day. Yet God was with her in them all ; 
and, in His own appointed time, permitted them to give place 
to prosperity and joy. And as He worked then, so He worketh 
now. It is no proof of His dearest love, when life passes by 
without a cloud — when sorrow and trial are strangers to our 
path. His word reveals that those whom He loved the best , 
alike male or female, endured the severest trials — that His love, 
His guiding word, were not given to the children of joy. To 
become His servant, His loved, His chosen, was to suffer and to 
labor. We see this throughout His word ; and shall we, dare 
we, expect their exemption now ? Oh ! no, no ! Would we love 
the Lord, would we truly be loved by Him, would we pray for 
and seek His paths, would we struggleon to the goal of immor- 
tal love and bliss, we must nerve both heart and frame to 
hear ; strengthen and arouse every faculty to endure and suffer ; 
for so did His chosen, His best beloved, and so too must we. 
We have still His word to be to us as the angelic whisper was 
to our ancestors. Their hope is ours, and their reward. 

Few other events mark the life of Sarah. The Most High 
had brought her forth from the trials, anxieties, and doubts of 
previous years. He had, in His infinite mercy, fulfilled His 
‘word, and bestowed on her the blessed gift for which, in the 
midst of happiness, she had pined. Continuing His loving 
kindness, He lengthened her days much beyond the usual sum 
of mortality, that she might rear her child to manhood, and 
receive all the blessed fruit of her maternal care in Isaac’s deep 
love and reverence for herself. In a mere superficial perusal 


V 2 THE WOMEN . OF ISRAEL. 

of the life of Sarah, as read in our Sabbath portions, we ar€ 
likely to overlook much of the consoling proofs of the Eternal 7 * 
compassionating love for His female children, which it so power- 
fully reveals. Sarah was ninety years of age when Isaac was 
born. In the course of nature, ten or twelve years more would 
either have closed her mortal career, or rendered it, from the 
.11 firm! ties of so great an age, a burden to herself and all around 
her. There was no need of her preservation to forward the 
decrees of the Lord. In giving birth to the child of promise, 
her part was fulfilled, and at the age of ten or twelve the bov 
might have done without her. But God is love, and the 
affections of His children are, in their strength and purity, 
peculiarly acceptable to Him. He never bestoweth happiness 
to withdraw it; and, therefore, to perfect the felicity of Sarah 
and her child, His tenderness preserved her in life and vigor 
seven and thirty years after she had given him birth. In this 
simple fact we trace the beneficent and tender Father, sympa- 
thizing not alone in every grief and pang, but .n every joy and 
affection of His creatures. We fe^-t to our heart’s core the truth 
of the words of Moses, “ Who hath God so near to him” as 
Israel ? What nation can so trace, so claim the love of the 
Eternal ? 

Nor was the preservation of Sarah the only proof of ou» 
Father’s loving tenderness towards her, and of His condescend- 
ing sympathy with the love she bore her child. The trial of 
faith in the sacrifice of his son was given to the father ; but the 
mother was spared the consuming agony which must have been 
her portion, even had her faith continued strong. God had 
compassion on the feebler, weaker nature of His female servant. 
He demanded not from her that which He knew the mother 
could not bear. He spared her, in His immeasurable love, the 
suffering which it pleased Him to inflict upon the father, — suf- 
fering and temptation not to satisfy the Lord, for His omniscience 
knew that His faithful servant would not fail ; but to prove tu 
future ages the mighty power of spiritual faith and love, even 
while in the mortal clay. 

In the early part of his spiritual career, even Abraham’s faith 
would in all probability have failed. He was not supernaturully 
endowed with divine grace and strength. All through his life 
we can trace his gradual advance and improvement, till his 
faith and love arrived at the climax which permitted even the 


PERIOD I. S ARAH . 


73 


ofiered and %nrk«urmunng sacrifice of his dearly beloved and 
now only child. Even m this we trace the guiding* and foster- 
ing love of the Lord — demanding not more than He knew could 
be given, and measuring the trial of faith according to the 
advancing strength or His servant, each one more than the last. 
But this consideration has more to do with Abraham individually 
and Israel at large, it is His loving kindness manifested towards 
Sarah that we, her female descendants, must take to our hearts, 
thence to derive alike strength and consolation. The conviction 
of the Eternal’s love for us individually is necessary for woman’s 
happiness, and peculiarly adapted to its bestowal. 

It is woman’s nature to yearn and droop for love — to shrink 
in agony from a lonely path — to long for some supporting arm 
on which to rest her weakness; and it is woman’s doom too 
often to find on earth no loving rest, and therefore is her lot so 
sad. But when she can once realize that she is the subject of a 
love as immeasurably superior in consolation, strength, and 
changeless sympathy, to that of man, as the heaven is above the 
earth : — when she can once feel she has a friend who will never 
“ leave her nor forsake” — in whose pitying ear she may pour 
forth trials and griefs, either petty or great, which she would 
not even if she might confide to man, secure not only of pity 
but of healing — when she is conscious that she is never lonely 
— never left to her own weakness, but in her every need will 
have strength infused — then, then is she so blessed that she is 
no more lonely, no more sad ! And the word of God vdll give 
us this thrice blessed consolation, not in His gracious promises 
alone, though they in themselves would be sufficient, but in His 
jealings with his creatures. 

As the ancestor of His beloved, we find Sarah’s death and 
age particularly recorded ; being the first woman of the Bible 
whose death and burial are mentioned. The deep grief of her 
iiusband and son are simply but touchingly betrayed in the 
brief words, “ And Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to 
weep for her ; ” and, at a later period, not till his marriage with 
Rebekah, “ and Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.” 
Words that portray the beauty and affection of Sarah’s domestic 
character, and confirm our belief that, although perhaps 
possessing many of the failings of her sex, she was yet a help 
meet for Abraham — a tender and judicious parent to her son 
- and akind, indulgent friend to the large household of which she 


*4 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


was tlie mistress. Her noble or rather princely rank, received 
as it had been direct from the Lord, is still more strongly 
proved by the intercourse between Abraham and the sons of 
Heth, when seeking from them a place to bury his dead : 
“ Hear us, my lord,” is their reply, “ thou art a mighty prince 
of Ood amongst us ; in the choicest of our sepulchres bury 
thy dead ; ” and it was with difficulty Abraham could elude the 
offered gift, and procure the cave as a purchase. His princely 
rank, however, and in consequence that of his wife, we see at 
once acknowledged, even by strangers, and the promise of the 
Lord, expressed in changing the name of Sarai into Sarah , 
clearly fulfilled. 

The grief of Isaac appears to have lasted yet longer than 
that of his father, and beautifully illustrates the love between 
the mother and son. Abraham, advanced in years and spiritual 
experience, felt less keenly the mere emotions of humanity ; lie 
was convinced that Sarah had only gone before him to that w r orld 
in which, from his great age, he would no doubt speedily join 
her. His many duties — his close communion with the Eternal 
— enabled him to rouse himself sooner from the grief, which 
at first was equally severe ; but Isaac was, according to the 
patriarchal reckoning of time, still a very young man, at the 
# age when feeling is keener, less controlled than at any other ; 
and when, though spiritual comfort is great, human emotions 
will have full vent. Except the three days’ journey to Mount 
Moriah with his father, Isaac does not appear to have been 
separated a single day from his mother ; and her care, her 
guiding and fostering love, had so entwined her round his 
heart, that for three years after her death her son could find 
no comfort. How exalted and lovely must have been that 
mother’s character to demand such a term of mourning from 
her son ; wdiose youth and sex would, in some, have speedily 
roused him from sorrow, or urged its forgetfulness in scenes of 
pleasure ! 

We have little more to add on the spiritual lesson and divine 
consolation which Sarah’s life presents to her female descend- 
ants, than those hints already given. Differently situated as 
we are, with regard to station, land, and customs, we may yet 
imitate her faithfulness in all her household duties — her love 
and reverence to her husband — her tenderness to her child — 
ber quiet, unpretending, domestic, yet dignified fulfilment of 


PERIOD I. SARAH. 7£ 

all which she was called upon to do. We may learn from her 
to set no value on personal charms, save as they may enhance 
the gratification of those who love us best ; or of rank and 
station, save as they demand from us yet deeper gratitude 
towards God, and more extended usefulness towards man. We 
may learn too from her history that it is better to wait for the 
Lord — to leave in His hands the fulfilment of our ardent wishes 
— than to seek to compass them by human means. We may 
trace and feel that nothing, in truth, is too wonderful for the 
Lord; that He will do what pleaseth Him, however we may 
deem it hopeless and in vain. Direct revelations, as vouchsafed 
to Sarah, indeed we have not, but God has, in His deep mercy, 
granted us His word — the record of all He has done — that 
we may feel lie is still our God ; and though He worketh now 
in secret — for our sins have hid from us His ways — yet lie 
worketh for us still, and hath compassion and mercy and love 
for each of us individually, even as He had for Sarah, and her 
bondwoman Hagar. All these to us, as women, her history 
reveals : as women of Israel, oh ! yet more. It is of no stranger 
in race, and clime, and faith we read. It is of our own — of 
one from whom Israel hath descended in a direct, unshadowed 
line— of one — the beloved and cherished partner of that 
chosen servant and beloved friend of the Eternal, for whose 
sake revelation was given to mankind — Israel made not alone 
the nation, but the first-born of the Lord ; and that law 
bestowed, which revealed a God of “ love, long-suffering and 
gracious, plenteous in mercy and truth ; ” — instructed us how 
to tread our earthly path, so as to give happiness to ourselves 
and fellow-creatures — to be acceptable to Him ; — and pointed 
with an ange 1 -finger to that immortal goal, where man shall 
live for ever ! 

Is it nothing to be the lineal descendants of one so favored 
— nothing to hold in our hands and shrine in our hearts, the 
record of her life from whom the race of promise sprang ? 
Nothing to peruse the wonderful manifestations of the Lord’s 
Co/e toiler — to feel that from Him direct was Sarah’s patent 
of nobility, and yet possess the privilege of being her descend 
Ant? Will the women of Israel feel this as nothing? Will 
they disdain their princely birth, their heavenly heritage? 
Will they scorn to look back on Sarah as their ancestor, and 
ret long for earthly distinctions, earthly rank? No! oh, no ’ 
°4 


<6 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 

Let us but think of these things, of those from whom we have 
descended, and our minds will become ennobled, our hearts 
enlarged. We shall scorn the false shame which would descend 
to petty meannesses to hide our faith, and so exalt us in the 
sight of a Gentile world. Humbled, cast off for a little 
moment as we are — liable to persecution, scorn, contumely — to 
be “ despised and rejected ” of men — to bear the burden of 
affliction from all who choose to afflict — still, still we cannot 
lose our blessed heritage unless we cast it off ; we cannot be 
deprived of our birthright unlesL, like Esau, we exchange it foi 
mere worldly pelf, and momentary (because earthly) gratifica- 
tion. We are still Israelites — still the chosen, the beloved, the 
aristocracy of the Lord. 


CHAPTER III. 

R E B E K A II. 

In the same beautiful country whence, nearly seventy years 
previous, the son of Terah had been called by the divine com- 
mand, still dwelt the children of liis brother, Nahor. Contrary 
to the long period of childlessness which had been the portion 
of Abraham, eight sons were born unto Nahor. And when 
tidings of his family again reached the patriarch, just after the 
offered sacrifice of his son, he heard that his brother w r as also a 
grandfather — Bethuel, one of his sons having married, and 
possessing sons and one fair daughter. The many wanderings 
of Abraham, the distance to which he had removed, and the 
almost impossibility of obtaining reciprocal intelligence, had, of 
course, prevented family intercourse. Yet, by the notice taken 
of Abraham’s having unexpectedly received intelligence of his 
kindred, and also by the momentous events recorded in the xxiv. 
chapter, it is evident that both Abraham and Nahor retained a 
vivid recollection of, and continued affection towards each other 
—an affecting illustration of the doctrine we so earnestly unholi 


PERIOD 1. REBEKAII. 


11 


— •that Holy Writ never fails to inculcate — alike by precept, 
character, and narrative — the ascendency , necessity , and beauty 
of the natural affections. Though elected to know and serve 
the Lord, and to promulgate the knowledge of the true religion 
throughout the world, still, no forgetfulness, no contempt of the 
less favored of his father’s house, actuated Abraham. In simple, 
questionless obedience to his God, he had departed from all the 
haunts, the friends of his youth r but to a disposition so strongly 
affectionate as his own, often and often must the yearnings have 
returned, to learn somewhat of the brother of his love. The 
characters of the Bible are all human : though we are but too 
apt to judge them by any and every other test than that of 
humanity. Religion, instead of diadening , ever deepens and 
strengthens mere human feelings. No one has ever yet truly 
and devotedly loved God without feeling every natural affection 
heightened and more precious. Indifference in any one single 
point is utterly banished. It cannot exist with true spirituality ; 
and therefore do we always find in the Bible, the strongest, 
most affectionate feelings actuating the chosen servants of the 
Lord. 

From a careful consideration of this portion of Bible history, 
and of Laban’s family in the sequel, it appears probable that 
Abraham had other reasons besides those of kindred for wishing 
his son to choose a wife from the daughters of Mesopotamia, 
instead of those of Canaan. Had the patriarch’s kindred been 
merely idolatrous as the other families of the earth, it is not likely 
that the mere recital of the steward should have called forth 
Laban and Bethuel’s answering exclamation — “ The thing pro- 
ceeded from the Lord, we cannot speak unto thee bad or good !” 
— nor many years afterwards, in Laban’s intercourse with his 
nephew, his entreaty, “ Tarry with me, for I have learned by 
experience that the Lord hath blessed me for thy sake.” It 
would seem from these simply recorded facts, that though they 
worshipped images, which are referred to more than once in 
the sequel, their religion was certainly purer than that of the 
Canaanites. It was from his father’s house Abraham had been 
elected and called by the Almighty. Ilis firm rejection and 
abhorrence of idols, his meek and gentle un-upbraiding conduct, 
his departure in simple obedience to an unknown Being, — all 
this was probably remembered and so commented upon by his 
kindred, that his memory had more influence than his presence ; 


78 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


and vague notions of the religion and the God whom he had 
followed and preached, mingled with the image-worship which 
they still retained. These notions, very possibly strengthened 
by the rumors of Abraham’s continued communing* with this 
mysterious God, and the many manifestations of a superhuman 
agency vouchsafed to him, which, by slow degrees, reached even 
Mesopotamia, prepared them to acknowledge and even believe 
in Him ; though from ignorance as to the manner of worship 
which could be acceptable to a Being so awful and invisible, 
they adhered to the worship of their fathers. 

Abraham no doubt felt that it would be easy to impart i*. 
the daughter of such a race, the true and spiritual religion of 
w T hich the Patriarch’s own family was the only witness. There 
would be no fear of her retaining and secretly promulgating the 
impure and idolatrous notions which would undoubtedly have 
been the case with the daughters of Canaan ; and this, acting 
powerfully on the affecting recollections of kindred and home, 
appeal's to me the real cause of Abraham’s intense anxiety to 
take a wife for his son Isaac from the daughters of his father’s 
house. 

Meanwhile the daughter of Bethuel had grown into beautiful 
womanhood, beloved and cherished alike by her parents and 
brothers, and pursuing with cheerful content and affection the 
simple routine of domestic life. There is no mention in Scrip- 
ture of her having ever been sought in marriage before the offer 
of Isaac. We are rather to suppose, that she was scarcely seen 
or known beyond the precincts of her father’s establishment ; 
and as this was the. case also with the daughters of Laban, 
some years afterwards, the supposition of their superiority to the 
other heathen nations is confirmed. 

The daily employments of the young females of the East 
appear to have been completely domestic ; and in obedience to 
these daily duties we find Rebekah one evening going as usual 
to the well with her pitcher on her shoulder to draw water. 
The group of strangers beside the well must have struck her as 
something remarkable, but we do not find that she in any 
way loitered or wavered in the steady performance of her task. 

“ And the damsel was very fair to look upon, a virgin : and 
die went down to the well , and filled her pitcher and came up. 
And the servant ran to meet her, and said, Let me, I pray thee, 
irink a little water of thy pitcher. And she said, Drink, mv 


PERIOD I. REBEKAII 


79 


ord : and she let down her pitcher upon her hand, and gave 
him drink. And when she had done giving him drink, she 
said, I will draw water for thy camels also, until they have 
done drinking. And she hasted and emptied her pitcher into 
the trough, and ran again unto the well to draw water, and 
drew for all his camels. 7 ' 

Among the many little exquisite touches of artless and gentle 
nature with which the Bible abounds, none surpass this for 
truth and beauty. The same unsophisticated nature that led 
her quietly to pursue her duty, without turning to the right 
hand or to the left, also prompted the active and cordial kind- 
uess to the stranger when he addressed her, and the respectful 
deference to his age and sex which the words “ Drink, my lord,” 
imply. It was the quiet self-possession, the modest ease and 
frankness, the total disregard of self, alike with regard to per- 
sonal trouble as to the impression her own beautiful face and 
form might make, which ever proceed from a proper self-esteem, 
without which no woman, however situated, can happily or with 
propriety pass through life. She not only gave refreshment to 
the steward, but filled the trough for the weary camels to drink 
also. Many times must she have ascended and descended to 
the well, burdened with a weighty pitcher — a fair and gentle 
girl, while so many strong men were standing round — but 
they were strangers and travellers, and she was in her own 
land. 

Well might Eliezer, “ wondering at her, hold his peace, to 
wit whether the Lord had made his journey prosperous or not.” 
It was difficult to believe that the prayer he had scarcely com 
eluded before Rebekah appeared, should so speedily be answered ; 
and it was, no doubt, with some little trembling he asked, 
“ Whose daughter art thou ? Tell me, I pray thee, is there 
room in thy fatner’s house for us to lodge in ?” and how must 
his heart have bounded with returning confidence at the artless 
reply : “ I am the daughter of Bethuel, the son of Milcah, which 
she bare unto Nahor. She said moreover unto him, We have 
both straw and provender enough, and room to lodge in.” Our 
ancient fathers, with much justice, suppose that the splendid 
presents of the steward followed this announcement, and were 
not given, as we might imagine from the general translations 
of the Bible, before he knew her name. They had been 
intrusted to him for the bride of Isaac ; and therefore, it was 


80 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


not likely lie sliould bestow them on any one, however beautiful 
and hospitable, unless perfectly convinced that she was the 
maiden destined so to be. The little conversation between 
them, and even the steward’s fervent ejaculation of thanksgiv- 
ing*, probably took place while the camels were drinking ; and 
it was when they had done, “that the man took a golden 
earring of half a shekel weight, and the bracelets for her hands 
of ten shekels weight of gold.” Greatly must the maiden have 
marvelled, not only at the richness of the presents, but that 
they should be offered at all ; and, true to the almost childish 
nature which the whole narration displays, “ she ran and told 
them of her mother’s house these things.” 

It is by some commentators considered strange, I believe, that 
in all which follows, Laban, not Bethuel, should be the principal 
actor. The Bible appears to tell us, that Laban was decidedly 
the head of his father’s house ; and, as there is no mention what- 
ever of Ptebek all’s father, no reference to any relation but her 
mother and brother, it does not seem probable that she had a 
father living, the Bethuel who is mentioned being possibly a 
younger brother, and one of very inferior consequence. 

We have already perceived that Rebekah “ told them of her 
mother's house.” And now, without any notice whatever of a 
father, we read, that “ Rebekah had a brother whose name was 
Laban.” And when he saw the earring and bracelets on his 
sister’s hands, and when he heard her words, he came unto the 
man who still stood with his camels beside the well, and accosted 
him, net only as one who was master, with independent author- 
ity, bu v , with an exclamation which confirms our previous 
suggestion, that some vague notions of Abraham’s God had 
reached even Mesopotamia. The hurried narration of his sister 
would not have been s ifficient incentive for such greeting ; — 
“ Come in, thou blessed of the lord ; wherefore standest thou 
without? for I have prepared the house, and room for the 
camels. And the man came into the house, and he ungirded 
his camels. And they gave straw and proveuder for the camels, 
and water to wash his feet, and the men’s feet who were with 
him. And they set meat before him to eat : but he said, I will 
not eat till I have said mine errand. And he (Laban) said, 
Speak on.” 

Laban, as the generous, unsuspicious host, had performed his 
part. And now, the servant of Abraham failed not to perform 


•PERIOD I. REBEKAH. 


81 


his. Earnest in his master's cause, his mission occupying alike 
heart and mind, — convinced that he was in the Lord’s hands, 
he would not wait till hunger was appeased and weariness sub- 
dued, but at once spoke ; his first words refusing all honor to 
himself by the simple declaration “ Servant 

of Abraham am I.” It was, indeed, a wondrous tale to which 
the family of Bethuel listened. By the words of Laban, at its 
conclusion, “ Behold, Rebekah is before thee,” we may infer, 
that the maiden and her mother were both present ; though, by 
no word or exclamation did the former interrupt a narrative 
which concerned her so deeply ; yet as a woman, and a very 
young one, how many feelings must have stirred within her, as 
the steward spoke ! 

Eliezer told how his venerable master had grown rich and 
great by the blessing of the Lord, who had also granted him, 
in his old age, a son, to whom Abraham had given all that he 
had : — how anxious he was to guard his son from a connexion 
with the Canaanites, and to take him a wife from his own 
kindred ; overruling Eliezer’s objection — “ Peradventure, the 
woman will not follow me,” — by the solemn assurance that 
“ the Lord, before whom I walk, will send His angel before 
thee, and prosper thy way — how, in obedience, he had set 
forth, and, arriving that day at the well, had prayed to the Lord 
God of his master Abraham, to grant that the virgin who, when 
he wished for a little water from her pitcher, should reply, 
u Drink thou, and I will draw for the camels also,” should be 
the maiden whom the Lord had appointed for his master’s 
son how his prayer had been heard and answered, by the 
appearance and kindly courtesy of Rebekah ; — and he con- 
cluded, “ I bowed down my head, and worshipped the Lord 
God of my master Abraham, who had led me in the right way, 
to take my master’s brother’s daughter for his son. And now, 
if you will deal kindly and truly with my master, tell me ; and 
if not, tell me ; that I may turn to the right hand, or the left.” 

Deeply indeed must the simple tale have affected its hearers. 
The rich, the princely Abraham had remembered and yearned 
towards his father’s house ; even those who, perchance, in his 
youth had reviled and persecuted him for his rejection of their 
idols ; seeking from them, in preference to every other, a wife 
for his son. “ The thing proceedeth from the Lord,” was their 
instant answer. “ We cannot sneak unto thee bad or good 


82 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL, 


Behold, Rebekah is before thee, take her, and go, and let hei 
be thy master’s son’s wife, as the Lord hath spoken.” 

Blessed thus far, the richest jewels of gold and silver were 
presented by the steward to the youthful bride, her mother and 
brother. Surely, if her father had still been living, he would 
here have been mentioned : but neither here, nor in the 55th 
and 60th verses following, which are important as relating to 
her influential kindred, is there any notice taken of his 
existence. 

One night only, the steward accepted the lavish hospitality 
of his hosts. Anxious to report the success of his mission, lie 
entreated, “ Send me away to my master.” But natural ties 
could not be so quickly severed without pain. How could they 
so suddenly part with the cherished darling of their house — in 
all probability never to look upon her again ? “ Let the damsel 
abide with us a few days,” her mother and brother said ; “ at 
least ten, after that she shall go.” But the steward entreated 
them to “hinder him not,” believing that to loiter, would be 
“ displeasing to the Lord who had prospered his way.” And 
they said, “ We will call the damsel, and inquire at her mouth. ’ 
Young and retiring as she was, her own voice was to decide the 
matter. They would neither retain nor send her away without 
her own consent; thus proving that even family authority, in 
the Bible, was an authority of love. “ And calling her, they 
said, Wilt thou go with this man ? And she said, I will go 
— a brief and simple answer, yet suited alike to her character 
and the occasion. No doubt, there will be some to exclaim 
against the reply as abrupt and unmaidenly ; but have they 
quite considered all the circumstances of the case ? Rebekah’s 
character, at this period of her life, was a beautiful blending of 
simplicity and truth. Sought by Abraham for his son, of 
whom, in all probability, she had already favorably heard ; 
selected by God himself, every natural feeling of woman was 
satisfied and soothed. Perhaps, now, in this period of ultra 
refinement, such simplicity will scarcely be understood. Yet, 
then , her meek assent was in perfect accordance with all that 
had passed before. Is it not ordained, even by God himself — 
that woman, even as man, should leave father, mother, and 
home, to cleave unto her husband ? Besides, this was nc 
engagement of mere human devising. She was, unconsciously, 
the instrument Ln the Eternal’s hand to further His decrees 


PERIOD I. REBEKAH. 83 

A.nd her brief assent was his inspiration, as certainly as all the 
previous incidents. Nor can we doubt for a moment, even 
while she declared her willingness to go, that natural affections 
were busy within her. Have not our readers themselves felt, at 
times, two completely opposing feelings filling their hearts at 
once ? And oh ! how blessed would it be at such times, if we 
could but realize that the words, fraught with a pain and 
anxiety unknown, unthought of, when we spoke them, proceed 
alone, as Rebekah’s “ I will go,” from the guidance of the Lord, 
and that therefore, spite of all the sufferings which may gather 
round us, they will in the end be blessed. 

Rebekah had accepted the presents of betrothal, and was 
therefore already of the family of Abraham. How then might 
nis steward go without her ? It was not her part to detain him 
on his way. We may imagine the tears of affection with 
which the fond blessing was pronounced by her hi others. The 
mother, though still present, is not mentioned ; for her prayers 
were in her heart. “ And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto 
her, Thou art our sister ; be thou the mother of thousands of 
millions, and let thy seed possess the gates of those which hate 
them.” And Rebekah arose (probably from the detaining arms 
of her kindred), and with her nurse, and attendant damsels, 
sought their camels, and accompanied the steward on his home- 
ward way. 

How many thoughts must have crowded the heart and mind 
of the young daughter of Bethuel during this journey — the home 
she had left, and the home she was about to seek — the friends 
of her childhood, and those unknown ; yet towards whom she 
turned with the yearning to love and be beloved : probably 
hearing fum the lips of the steward so much of his young 
master, as to render him in her mind no longer a stranger. 

Simply and beautifully is the last touch to this portion of her 
history given by the inspired historian. Canaan was reached ; 
the tents of the patriarch in sight. And lifting up her eyes, 
Rebekah beheld a man walking forth in the fertile fields ; bear- 
ing in his pensive mind and measured tread, the aspect of one 
in holy meditation. It was eventide, that still solemn hour of 
holy musing, sought only by those who have no thought from 
which to shrink, who can call up sweet dreamy visions of the 
past — sad, yet how inexpressibly soothing. That holy hour, 
when the soul of the departed comes back to the spirit of the 


34 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


bereaved, holding such commune as must proclaim our union 
with the invisible world, and confirm our immortality. The 
maiden probably guessed who it was on whom she gazed. But 
when the question was asked and answered by her guiue, modesty, 
refinement, simplicity, and that respect which ever springs from 
the heart, all impelled her to “ light off' her camel,” and “ to take 
a veil and cover herself.” 

This was true humility, for she knew her own dignity. She 
demanded no more respect than she paid herself. She waited 
no ceremonious introduction, but alighting from the camel, com- 
pletely shrouded in her veil, she proved by the one action, the 
respect due to the son of Abraham, her destined husband, and by 
the other retained her own gentle dignity, by concealing every 
charm, till the servant’s tale was told, and Isaac claimed her as 
his bride. Personal beauty was in this case as nothing, though 
she possessed it in no ordinary degree. Her conduct proceeded 
from an artless, unsophisticated nature, timidly shrinking from 
the eyes of him whom she most wished to please — a desire to 
conceal the very beauty which she must have yet ardently hoped 
that he might prize ; and her hope was fulfilled, for “ Isaac 
brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent, and he took Rebekah, 
and she became his wife, and he loved her, and Isaac was com- 
forted after his mother’s death.” How beautifully do those few 
words illustrate the extent of his love both towards his mother 
and wife ! Though three years had passed since the death of his 
mother, he yet mourned for her. Not even the affections of his 
father could satisfy that painful yearning ; — not even religion, 
with her host of soothing thoughts and blessed images, could 
wholly comfort him, though she gave him strength to endure, 
and spiritual love to bless the hand which smote. Nor is this 
a contradictory assertion. Religion leads us to Him who alone 
can heal, in deep aud most fervid prayer ; — that prayer brings 
us, from Him whose deep mercy hears and answers, support and 
consolation, by the conviction that we are not lonely — that we 
shall meet again those whom we love in His presence, who i* 
love itself ; and this is comfort. The comfort here alluded to 
was for the yearnings of the mortal ; the immortal could realize 
consolation, the mortal could not. Though it be in very truth 
the invisible soul we love, yet we become so knit with the mortal 
habitation of that soul, that we cannot feei it has perished from 
our sight for ever, without an agony of heart that time, an I 


PERIOD I. REBEKAH. 


86 


prayer, and constant communings with the invisible Spirit alone, 
can in any way assuage. Nor is there one portion in the Holy 
Bible which would tell us that God condemns such grief. If 
with the whole fervor of our immortal being, we can bow in 
much submission, faith, and love, unto His will, He condemns not, 
nay, feels compassionate, and in His own good time heals the 
agony which our human nature feels through the human agency 
of wife, or friend, or child. And so it was with Isaac. Wedded 
as he was to the memory of his mother, no ordinary woman 
could have so gained his love as to give him comfort, and fill up 
the aching void which had existed three long years. He must 
have seen in Rebekah when she first became his wife, a reflection 
of Sarah’s endearing qualities ; and united as these were to youth 
and beauty, inspired still deeper and dearer emotions than he had 
ever experienced before. 

To some dispositions, this sudden elevation in a social and 
domestic position would have been a dangerous ordeal ; but 
neither presumption, arrogance, nor pride, appears to have marked 
the conduct of Rebekah. The same steady performance of 
household duty manifested in her girlhood, probably continued 
iu her higher and more responsible station ; and year after year 
found her calmly following the quiet routine of daily duty 
happily to herself and to her household. And here, for a brief 
while, we would pause to gather the sweet blossoms of instruc- 
tion and guidance proffered by a Father’s love, which Rebekah’s 
history, thus far considered, can impart. We would linger a 
moment on the past ere we go forward, for the picture must be 
changed. Yet it is no marvellous or incomprehensible change — 
it is no history of woman in an era so long past that we wonder, 
and scarce believe — the picture is too perfect even now ; — it is 
woman then , and woman now , as we shall see hereafter. 

Although from the wide distinction between patriarchal and 
modern times, our position and duties as daughters of Israel 
can never resemble those of Rebecca, we have, like her, domestic 
duties to perform, and a station not only to fulfil but to adiorn, 
so as to excite towards us respect and love. The women of the 
Bible are forcibly portrayed, not for us to follow them exactly, 
for that we could not do, but from their conduct in their 
respective spheres to guide us in ours ; from the approval or 
reproof bestowed directly or indirectly upon them, to teach their 
descendants what is acceptable in the sight of our heavenly 


96 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


Father and what is not; and of this we may rest assured there 
is no contradiction to puzzle us in the Word of God. The pre- 
cepts of His law are proved by the practice of His servants. 
“ Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might,” 
was said centuries after by the sage monarch, who, in obedience 
to the command of God relating to Kings, must have been 
acquainted with the whole of His law ; and that precept was 
exemplified in Rebecca’s conduct at the well. She had everj 
temptation to turn aside a few moments in her simple task. 
Had she ever accustomed herself to encourage wandering 
thoughts in her different employents, to turn from them for 
every frivolous pretence, she would never have withstood the 
temptation of idling away her time with the goodly looking 
strangers, and thus demonstrated a character totally unfit to be 
the ancestress of God’s chosen race. But as she went down to 
the well and filled her pitcher, and came up, “ neither turning 
to the right nor to the left,” so it behoves us to follow our daily 
duties, would we, like her, receive the blessing of the Lord. It 
is said to be woman’s nature ever to be unsteady — to be caught 
by the glare of every new object, every new face — to become 
frivolous from allowing herself in youth to flutter from one 
employment to another, seeking but sweets, and terrified at the 
first sight of all that may seem more harsh or stern. But such 
frivolity is incompatible with the regenerate and spiritual woman 
whose guidance is her Bible, whose sustainer is her God. She 
feels too deeply responsible to Him for every hour of her time 
to squander its smallest portion needlessly away. She seeks to 
lo’’e Him too earnestly, too continually, not to associate the 
hope of His approval with her every employment, and so asso- 
ciated it is impossible for them to be frivolously followed or 
lightly interrupted ; and if domestic duties were thus performed 
by the young daughter of a house who knew not by direct reve- 
lation the Lord, how much more devolves upon us her descend- 
ants, to whom the Lord himself has vouchsafed, through His 
holy Word, both guidance and example ! O ! let us thei^, in our 
every pursuit, first ponder well if w r e may lay it before our God, 
and upon it ask His blessing ; and if we truly can, let us pursue 
it with all our heart, and soul, and might, if w T e would indeed 
seek the loving tenderness of our God, the respect of the world, 
and of ourselves. 

Nor is her steadiness the only portion of Rebecca’s earh 


PERIOD I. REBEKAH. 


87 


character demanding our admiration. The winning ana obliging 
gentleness with which she met the stranger’s address proceeded 
from the genuine kindness, the real politeness of an utterly 
unselfish heart. The request was not only granted, but granted 
with such sweetness of manner and respectful words as threefold 
to enhance the kindness of the deed. The beautiful laws con- 
tained in the 32d, 33d, and 34th verses of the 19th chapter of 
Leviticus had not then been issued, yet the conduct of Rebecca 
was a practical illustration of the spirit which they teach. She 
paid respect to age, and did unto the stranger even as if he had 
been one born in the land ; and this we may all do. It is not 
enough that we act kindly , and mean kindly, in our intercourse 
either with friends or strangers. We must make manifest kindly 
feeling by a kindly and conciliating manner. At a period when 
the drift of education sometimes appears to condemn, conquer, 
and entirely annihilate feeling, this will be difficult, for widely 
different is the manner which is taught , however perfect may be 
its propriety, its gentleness, its suavity, to that which springs 
from the heart, and has its origin in overflowing and unselfish 
feeling. But has the heart — has feeling anything to do with 
our behavior to a perfect stranger, and acquaintance of the hour, 
whom in the whole course of our life we may never meet again ? 
It has, and it may be productive of good, both to ourselves and 
others. The great, the good, the mighty and most merciful 
Creator of heaven and earth disdained not, even in the midst of 
this stupendous creation, to bid the earth bring forth her flowers, 
not to serve as food, or shelter, or absolute use in the common 
meaning of the word, but simply to beautify, to enliven, to 
rejoice, to fling a gladness and a sunshine on the desert waste 
and weary wilderness, and add beauty and rejoicing even where 
all around is joy; and as flowers to the earth, so is kindliness 
to man. It will not remove grief, nor give him what perchance 
he needs, but it may cause a flower to spring up in the lonely 
recess or careworn furrow of his heart, whose memory may 
linger long after the flower itself has perished. And shall we 
scorn the power that will do this? Shall we think a flower of 
half an hour’s growth too worthless to be given, too trifling to 
be gathered? Oh! let us not encourage such a thought. We 
may know, indeed, nothing of the stranger with whom, for f? 
orief hour, we may be thrown ; but that very ignorance should 
jrge us to courtesy and kindliness. His course may have been 


88 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


one of care, his present lot a waste, and a gentle tone and kind 
maimer may be to him as the flower in the desert wiling him a 
brief while from his own sad thoughts. Or it may be his lot 
has been and is all joy ; and yet will kindliness be sweet, even 
as the flower in the festive hall, or in the pathway of the bride ; 
its form scarce noticed at the time, yet so blending with its 
associated images as in memory to be called up again and yet 
again. We are not placed here to live for curselves alone, and 
more powerfully than aught else, if it spring from the heart , , 
and has its birth in feeling , will a kind and gentle manner rivet 
the links of brotherhood, bid us feel we are all children of our 
common Father, and so strengthen our love in Him, and for 
each other. 

On us more especially, aliens and exiles from our own land, is 
manner, as the mirror of the heart, incumbent. There was a 
time, but lately passed away, when to perform this duty was 
impossible, and therefore supposed to be unnecessary. When 
scorned, persecuted, condemned as the very scum of the earth, 
hated and reproached, it was as utterly impossible for us to 
manifest courtesy and kindness, as to receive them. Hatred 
begets hatred, as scorn begets scorn, more especially when 
neither emotion may be avowed. What did the cringing man- 
ner, the abject tone of the persecuted, tortured Jew conceal ? 
Was it marvel it should be hatred as strong, if not stronger, 
because utterly powerless, than that of his cruel, his tyrannical 
oppressor? But now that in 'some enlightened and blessed 
realms these fearful times are past, and the right hand of 
fellowship extended to us, shall the exile and oppressed refuse 
to meet in amity and confidence, the sons of the land which 
gives them protection and home? We were commanded to 
show kindness to a stranger, as to one born amongst us. That 
blessed privilege is no longer ours, for we are strangers in a 
strange land ; yet may we still obey the spirit of the law, and 
in the cultivation of a kindly heart, and manifestation of a 
kindly feeling, let us remember we have not only an individual , 
but a national character to support — that a brief half hour’s 
intercourse with a stranger is endowed with power to exalt or 
to lower the cause of Israel ; and as Rebekah’s kindly cordi- 
ality was blessed to her, by making her the wife of Isaac, and 
so revealing to her the glorious tidings of a God of love, so may 
the kindly manner of the youngest daughter of Israel be b’es-ed 


PERIOD I. REBEKAH. 


89 


to her, by making her the unconscious instrument, in God’s 
hand, to exalt His holy faith, and proclaim His truth in the 
heart and mind of the Gentiles amongst whom she dwells. 

Yet, Rebekah’s courtesy to the steward demonstrates neither 
presumption nor forwardness incompatible with her age or sex. 
We find her, directly her brother Laban comes forth, retiring to 
her own modest statiou in her mother’s tent, and claiming no 
farther notice. We see, therefore, that to act kindly demands 
not the forsaking our natural sphere. We are not to look 
abroad for opportunities to act as Rebekah did; but, like her, 
we shall find them without leaving our home, in the domestic 
and social intercourse of daily life. Let us ponder well upon 
these things, and, as daughters of Israel, make it our glory and 
our pride to do our simplest duty “ with all our might our 
pleasure, to scatter flowers on the path of all with whom we 
may be thrown ; and dwelling with meek and loving content- 
ment in our appointed sphere, remember that the cause of Israel 
is our own, and it is in our power to exalt or degrade it. 

For twenty years, the lives of Rebekah and Isaac appear to 
have passed in all the quiet felicity of domestic love and peace. 
Abraham was still living, happy in the happiness of his son 
Isaac ; for to his other sons “ Abraham gave gifts, and sent 
them away from Isaac his son, while he yet lived, eastward unto 
the east country.” He gave them, in all probability, a know- 
ledge of the Lord enough to recognise and worship him; but in 
Isaac, Abraham knew was the promised seed, and therefore by 
him was the aged patriarch’s home. Anxiously he, too, must 
have anticipated the birth that would prolong his line, but from 
his personal experience in “ waiting for the Lord,” his feelings 
must have been less anxious than those of Isaac. In these 
twenty years, we hear of no temporal disturbance nor divine 
interference, as in the earlier life of Abraham ; but that spiritual 
communing with the Lord, and improvement in knowledge of 
and faith in Him, in no ways slackened or diminished, we are 
called upon to believe by the simple fact of Isaac going to 
u entreat the Lord for his wife,” and the instant answer to his 
orayer. Again we see divine interference, not what is called 
natural causes , operating for the fulfilment of the Eternal’s 
promise of a chosen seed. Jacob, the father of the twelve 
tribes, from one or other of whom the wandering Hebrew can 
»till trace descent and claim the promises vouchsafed unto his 


90 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


fathers — Jacob, even as Isaac, was the child, not alone of 
promise, but of prayer. 

Those twenty years saw Rebekah as we last beheld her, only 
matured in the graces of womanhood, and so grafted on the 
house of Abraham, as like him to worship and know the great 
God alone. She had had, as yet, no temptation to swerve aside 
from the straight path of duty. A beloved and cherished wife, 
daughter, and mistress, her life passed by so smoothly, her affec 
tion so devoted to one first object, and thence calmly emanating 
on all under her influence, that she was, as every other woman 
in a similar position must have been, still entirely ignorant of 
the shoals and quicksands in her heart, which might lead to sin, 
and end in sorrow. 

Yet her first action, after proof was given of the Eternal’s 
gracious answer to her husband’s prayer, was one of such child- 
like simple confidence in the power and wisdom of the Lord to 
answer all of doubt and fear, that to reconcile her conduct after- 
wards becomes more difficult. Unusual and incomprehensible 
suffering so oppressed her as to raise a doubt of the pro- 
mise being then about to be fulfilled. “ If it be so,” she 
thought, “ why am I thus ?” — and without pause or hesitation, 
went directly “ to inquire of the Lord.” She asked no advice, 
demanded no human aid — but in heartfelt prayer — for in 
prayer only could she so inquire — laid before Him her every 
emotion, and from him implored reply. We would humbly ask 
those, if indeed there can be such, who deny to woman an 
immortal soul, refuse her the blessed privilege of individual and 
secret commune with her Creator, and believe man’s prayer 
alone omnipotent, how they would interpret this very simple 
narration ? They may assert, as I believe some commentators 
do, that it was through Abraham she inquired of the Lord, and 
received reply — but, as we have no warrant whatever in Scrip- 
ture, by direct word or implied inference, to confirm this asser- 
tion, we must reject it altogether. The long years which 
Rebekah had passed in the household of Abraham, had not 
flown by unused and spiritually unimproved. She had seen the 
Great and Invisible Being acknowledged and adored. She had 
been taught by example ; and we may be scripturally certain, 
though the fact itself is not mentioned, by precept also. The 
natural impulse of humanity, under all difficulties and suffering, 
is to pray— and in the beautiful simplicity of the patriarchal 


PERIOD I. EEBEKAH 


9! 


3gL-s, no artificial coldness, no appalling scepticism, no disheart- 
ening doubt, could have crowded round her, whispering that the 
prayer was vain, that the Creator of heaven and earth was 
a Being too far removed from woman’s petty griefs to listen and 
give reply In the simple trusting confidence of a child, she 
sought the Parent whose love was omnipotent not only t<? 
understand the doubt and pain, but to give relief, and her confi- 
dence was answered. How that gracious answer was vouch 
safed, whether through Abraham, or directly to herself, is 
I believe, an argument — but Scripture bias us believe, without 
hesitation, the latter — “And the Lord said unto her” cleai 
simple words, banishing at once all necessity for mediation 
either of man or angel ; words almost impossible, even wilfully 
to be misunderstood. The how she received this answer, whe- 
ther through the medium of the ear, or by an impression on the 
mind — can be of very little consequence ; and is one of those 
cavilling inquiries which we could wish banished, ere formed 
into words; tending as they do to fill up the mind with vain 
and idle speculations, instead of the pure simple truths of Scrip- 
ture. It is enough, and a most blessed enough for us, that the 
“ Lord said unto her,” the direct answer to her inquiring 
prayer. The words were mysterious — that she was already the 
mother of two opposing nations, one of whom should be stronger 
than the other — and the elder should serve the younger.” Yet, 
mysterious as they must have been, they came from the Lord. 
He had graciously vouchsafed to explain the cause of her 
unusual sufferings, and Rebekah was satisfied ; for we find 
not another word from her of either wonderment or complaint. 

And oh \ what a blessed incentive have we from this simple 
narrative, in ah our griefs and sufferings, bodily or mental, 
to inquire of the Lord — to come to Him as our ancestress, 
hi guileless faith and simple-minded prayer. He is cur God as 
He was hers — yea, ours — exiles, wanderers, women as we are, 
and who, with the holy word of God within his hand, shall daro 
to refuse to us, as women, as Israelitish women, the power, the 
purity, the privilege of prayer ? Who shall dare assert that wo 
are powerless to pray, or need the mediation of man, to bear up 
our petitions to the throne of grace ? Mothers, wives, daughters 
of Israel, you alone must prove the utter falsity of this charge ! 
Before the law, under the law, during the captivity, we shaV 


92 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


still find the Hebrew woman seeking her God in prayer 
and receiving from him direct reply. Oh ! shall we not thus prove 
that we have a soul immortal as that of man — that the very 
breath of our being, the light of our path, the support of 
strength, is prayer — that prayer which brings us daily, nay 
hourly, in commune with a loving Father, whose tender sympa- 
thy is endless as His love. Let us prove we need not Chris- 
tianity either to teach, or direct us how to pray — but, turning 
to the biassed pages of our own Bible, make manifest that 
to look further is not needed. That there we have indeed suffi- 
cient for encouragement and hope ; for confidence and faith. 
As Rebekah prayed, so too may we ; and as our Father 
answered her, so will He us. Not indeed with word direct, but 
with that blessed calm, and hope, and faith, which prayer 
only can bestow ; and with that heavenly patience which 
will enable us to “wait for the Lord,” in the firm belief 
that whatever He may will is best. It is worthy of remark that 
Rebekah is the first recorded instance of woman’s immediate 
appeal to God, and the condescending reply. 

At the appointed time Isaac and Rebekah became parents 
of twin sons, who grew and flourished ; and in early youth dis- 
played a contrariety of disposition and pursuits which must have 
appeared strange, in such nearly allied relations, had it not been 
rendered clearly intelligible, at least to their mother by the 
previous words of the Lord. But yet these words ao not 
appear to me sufficient for Rebekah always to have regarded 
Jacob as the promised seed. The promise, or rather explana- 
tion, given in answer to her prayer, was simply, “the one 
people shall be stronger than the other, and the elder shall serve 
the younger not as was the case with Abraham, when the 
promised se^d was specifically named. And in the very next 
revelation which was vouchsafed to Isaac, a few years afterwards, 
we read, “ Sojourn in this land, and I will be with thee, and will 
bless thee ; for unto thee, and unto thy seed, will I give all 
these countries, and I will perform the oath which I sware unto 
Abraham thy father. And I will make thy seed to multiply as 
the stars of heaven, and will give unto thy seed all the coun- 
tries; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be 
blessed and again, the last verse of this same xxvii. chapter — 
die Lord appeared unto him the same night, and said, “ I 


PERTOD I. REBEKAH. 91 

fern the God of Abraham, thy fathei ; fear not, for I am 
with thee, and will bless thee, and multiply thy seed for my ser- 
vant Abraham’s sake.” 

The Eternal expressly says thy seed.” Isaac might be jus- 
tified in supposing that both his sons were concerned in the pro- 
mises, until Esau’s reckless disregard of his birthright, and 
other spiritual blessings, in addition to his intermarrying with 
the daughters of Canaan, must have convinced his father 
that not from him could spring the chosen seed. The revelation 
that “ the elder should serve the younger,” must have occasioned 
Rebekah many mental inquiries ; but even if she herse.f 
supposed that Jacob was the destined inheritor of Abraham’s 
line, it is evident that she did not impart it to her husband. 

Isaac’s love for the reckless and able hunter, Esau, is one of 
those contradictions of the heart, unaccountable indeed, but 
very often found. He loved Esau best, because in every respect 
he was completely his opposite. Isaac was meek, affectionate, 
faithful, quietly and contentedly dwelling in one spot, moving 
thence only at the command of the Lord : satisfied with the 
temporal blessings around him, and the spiritual blessings of 
promise. Esau, bold, enterprising, ever roving in search of 
active pursuit ; heeding naught but the present ; scorning his 
home and home ties ; rude and rough, yet, when excited, 
deeply and warmly affectionate to his aged father. And Isaac 
loved him better than his younger son, who, more like himself, 
“ was a plain or upright man dwelling in tents.” But Rebekah 
loved Jacob. Sacred history does not say why — and we are 
therefore permitted to infer, that it was simply because it is in 
womai ’s nature to love him best who is least loved by his 
father. But Rebekah’s favoritism, as we shall see in the sequel, 
was stronger and more culpable than that of Isaac. All such 
emotions are stronger in woman’s heart than in man’s — because, 
with the former, feeling is the most powerful, and with the 
latter,' reason. Partiality must always occasion injustice, and 
more particularly in a parent ; for no task demands more con- 
trol and feeling, more complete conquest of self, than that of 
parental affection. The dispositions, the characters of the 
divers members of one family are so varied, that it is impossible 
to guide all by one and the same training. An impartial mother 
will know every light and shadow of every disposition, and 
guide and act accordingly. A partial mother sees but the 


94 


TIIE WOMEN OF ISRaEL, 


virtues and qualities of one, and from want of sympathy at.! 
proper management of the other in early years, makes him in 
reality all that she believed him. Jacob was domestic, because 
a mother’s doting love made his home one of enjoyment, and 
administered to every want. 

It was not till after Sarah’s death that Isaac even sought a 
wife, and not till he was parted from his mother that Jacob 
loved, proofs all convincing of the strength, the beauty, the 
fulness of the love which in those simple ages united the mother 
and the son. 

To Esau this soothing and blessed love was not given as it 
was to Jacob; and while his hasty and inconsiderate marriage 
with the daughters of the Hittite was a grief of mind to Isaac 
and Rebekah, the latter’s neglect might have been in part then* 
cause. Esau had no kindly woman’s heart to turn to, as had 
his brother, yet we have proof that his affections were as strong 
— perchance, from his ruder character, yet stronger — and the 
very want of female love at home might have first urged him to 
seek it from the stranger. Oh ! it is sad when partiality and its 
concomitant, injustice, obtains entrance into a mother’s heart. 
It steals in so silently, so disguisedly, that unless every avenue 
be guarded, its advances are utterly unknown, till it has gained 
a strength and substance which hold us chained. Mere human 
love, omnipotent as in a mother’s breast it is, is not sufficient to 
guard us from such weakness — no, nor former strength and 
stability of character. Rebekah had all this, and yet as a mother 
she fell. It can only be that close communion with the univer- 
sal Father, who alone knows and feels every secret throbbing 
of a mother’s heart, and from whose hand alone can come the 
strength, not only to guide aright her treasures, but to feel 
aright herself. 

During the growth of his sons, Isaac’s temporal riches very 
greatly increased. Abraham’s death did not take place till his 
grandsons were fifteen. He who had believed it next to 
impossible in his old age to have a son, lived not only to Hess 
his son, but his son’s seed. A famine had sent Isaac and his 
family, by direction of the Eternal, to Gerar, and there he dwelt 
until he became so rich and great that the “ Philistines envied 
him and their king, Abimelech, said unto him, “Depart from 
us, for thou art much mightier than we.” And he did so, and 
after some wanderings, fixed his tent at Beersheba ; and there 


PERIOD I. REBEKAII, 


93 


again the Lord appeared unto him, bidding him “ fear not, for 
He was with him.” Beersheba, therefore, appears to have been 
the scene of all the domestic events which followed — Esau 
selling his unvalued birthright — his subsequent marriage^ — the 
vexations thence proceeding to Isaac and Rebekah — and those 
bodily infirmities of the former, which occasioned his anxious 
desire to “bless his son oefore he died.” 

Rebekah heard the words of her husband. She had seen 
him call liis firstborn to his couch, and bid him seek venison, 
and bring the savory meat that he loved, that his soul might 
bless him before he died ; and her heart swelled tremblingly 
within her. Esau ? Was Esau to have his father’s blessing ? 
He who had sold his birthright, and so spurned his privileges 
as heir ; and if he had it, how could the Lord’s word be fulfilled, 
and the “ elder serve the younger ?” Why could she not pre- 
vent it, and secure to him whom the Lord before his birth had 
chosen as the mightiest, the blessing of his father ? It was 
easy to be accomplished ; and surely, as the Lord had said it, 
she was justified in using any means to bring it to pass. Such 
was weak, finite reasoning — such the baneful whisper of our 
earthly nature, urged on by the rushing torrent of human affec- 
tions. In that dread moment of temptation, how might she 
realize the unquestioning faith which would bid her feel, “ The 
Lord hath spoken, and will he not do it ?” That His will 
needed no human aid for its fulfilment ; that He would do His 
pleasure in the very face of those contradictory events, which 
human will and finite wisdom might so weave as to render its 
fulfilment seemingly impossible. If Rebekah had but “ inquired 
of the Lord” in this perplexity, as on a former one, the whole 
train of deceit and its subsequent suffering would have been 
averted. But she was still a woman, weak, wavering, a very 
reed in her mortal nature, and liable, as every child of Adam, 
to temptation and to sin. 

Had she even waited but one brief hour, all would have been 
well — the evil impulse would have been conquered in her pious 
heart, by a train of thought as above, but there was no time 
either to wait or thiuk again ; and, acting on the impulse, she 
called Jacob, and after informing him of his father’s directions to 
his brother, continued in a strain that would lead us to believe, 
that even at that moment she feared Jacob’s upright nature 
ivould shrink from the task she imposed “ Now, therefore, my 


56 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

sol, obey my voice, according to that which I command thee/ 
She olaimed his unquestioning obedience, ere imparting that 
which she desired, and then proceeded. Surely her heart must 
have reproached her, when her own son ventured to suggest, 
though guardedly and respectfully, that it was a fraud, and 
might bring upon him a curse instead of a blessing. Yet still she 
enforces the command, “Upon me be the curse, my son, only 
ooey my voice.” And he did obey her, weakly and mistakenly ; 
for had he resisted, had he submissively, yet firmly braved her 
momentary wrath, the evil temptation must have been subdued 
and the mother saved by the unscrupulous honesty of the son. 

But this was not to be. To make manifest His ways, that 
suffering must attend deceit, however for the moment it may 
seem to succeed, the Eternal permitted the plans of finite form- 
ing uninterruptedly to proceed, working out indeed His will 
through them, but punishing even in success. The kid was 
procured and dressed — the very hands and neck of Jacob dis- 
guised, lest their smoothness should betray him ; and thus 
attired by a mother to deceive, he approached the bed-side of 
his blind father. How fearfully must the heart of Rebekah have 
throbbed at every word uttered by her husband and son ! How 
terrified at the words of the unsuspecting, yet half doubting 
Isaac ! “Come near, I pray thee, that I may feel thee, my son, 
whether thou be my very son Esau or not.” And Jacob went 
near unto Isaac his faiher, and he felt him, and said, “ The voice 
is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” And, 
again, as doubting still, he asks, “ Art thou my very son Esau ? 
and Jacob answered, I am.” The inspired historian might not 
interrupt his brief, yet how deeply impressive detail, to dilate on 
a woman’s feelings ; yet we, her descendants, are surely justified 
in judging for a moment of Rebekah’s emotions during this 
interview, by what our own would be. She could have had no 
support, no stay, for she had wilfully banished truth, and how, 
then, might she pray ? Her whole heart and mind must have 
been troubled and tossed by every trifling word ; discovery and 
shame, perhaps the very loss or estrangement of her husband’s 
love, were as likely as the longed for success. How often, 
during that interim, must she have longed once more to tread 
the path of truth, for Rebekah was a mere novice in deceit ! Her 
nature, as w T e have seen, was guileless and open as the day ; the 
mere temptation of the moment, and its consequent anxious and 


PERIOD I. REBEKAH. 


97 

impelling feelings, could not have so changed that nature, as to 
make her an unmoved witness of that which followed — the very 
falsehood repeated and insisted upon by those lips which she 
had taught from infancy to lisp forth truth. But when the 
blessing was obtained, when she saw her plan had in truth suc- 
ceeded, we may suppose, judging still by human nature, that 
these agonizing doubts and fears were for the moment calmed 
in the triumph of success — conscience was hushed again, in the 
thought that she had compassed by stratagem that which she 
believed impossible to have been obtained else — tint it must 
have been right and good so to have acted, or it would not have 
been permitted to succeed. Alas ! how often do we so deceive 
ourselves ! Could we but glance a little, a very little, further on, 
we should know, and feel (how bitterly !) that the very deceit 
we believed innocent, because it brought success, has been our 
first step in the paths of woe. 

And so it was with Rebekah, though as yet she knew it not. 
Her feelings of triumph could not, however, have lasted long: 
“ And it came to pass, as soon as Isaac had made an end of 
blessing Jacob, and Jacob was yet scarce gone out from the 
presence of his father, that Esau, his brother, came in from 
hunting;” and that interview followed, which, for simple and 
touching pathos, is not surpassed by any incident in the Bible. 

Rebekah was a partial, but not a weak or unkind mother. 
She loved Jacob better than his brother, but Esau was still her 
son, her first-born, and oh ! how painfully must her heart have 
yearned towards him, when she heard his “great and exceeding 
bitter cry !” — “ Hast thou but one blessing, my father — bless 
me, even me also, O my father — and Esau lifted up his voice 
and wept.” Esau, the rude, the careless hunter, who had 
seemed to care for naught but his own pleasures ; the chase, the 
field, the wild ! He bowed down by his blind father like an 
infant, and wept; beseeching the blessing of which a mother 
and a brother’s subtlety had deprived him. Could Rebekah 
have been a witness, or even hearer of this scene, without losing 
all the triumph of success, in sympathy with the anguish of her 
first born ? It is impossible to ponder on her previous character, 
without being convinced of this. It is not from one act, one 
snresisted temptation, that we ought to pronounce judgment on 
a fellow-creature : yet, from our unhappy proneness to con- 
fiemr, we generally do so. The character of Rebekah is thus 


98 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


too often supposed to be evil alone, and her unfortunate decep 
tion in favor of her best beloved son is the only part of her life 
brought strongly forward : whereas, if we look and think on all 
that sacred history has recorded of her, that there is also perfect 
silence as to any other fault (which, had she committed, we may 
be sure would have been told for our warning) — it becomes 
evident that this guilty action proceeded, not from forethought , 
which would have manifested a naturally evil disposition, but 
from impulse ; the thought, the temptation of a moment, over- 
balancing by its force the rectitude of years. As forethought, 
we must condemn both the sin and the sinner. As impuLse, we 
must abhor the sin — but only grief and trembling for the weak- 
ness of human nature must attend our reflections on the sinner. 
Nor are we justified in denying her those emotions of grief and 
doubt, which must have succeeded the triumphant success of 
her momentarily formed plan. 

But self-accusation was not to be her only punishment. Bid 
the blessed word of the All-Just relate the deception alone, w r e 
might well hesitate to affirm that her conscience brought 
reproach, and believe that the deed was not as guilty as it seems. 
But we are not thus left to our own imaginations. The 
events which followed, so prove, without doubt or question, the 
displeasure of the Eternal against the deed, that w*e can have 
no hesitation whatever in believing that conscience, “ the 
angel of the Lord,” was busy within her, ere the bolt of justice 
fell. 

“ And Esau hated Jacob, because of the blessing wherewith 
his father blessed him. And Esau said in his heart, The days 
of mourning for my father are at hand ; — then will I slay my 
brother Jacob. And these words of Esau her elder son were 
told to Rebekah.” What fearful tidings for a mother ! How 
must her thoughts have returned, with agonizing forebodings, 
to the first death which had marred this beautiful world. Had 
not that been fratricide and for envy, the same feeling 
which now actuated Esau ? And was not she, as Eve had been, 
the cause ? Still nearer cause ; for she it was, who, by leading 
Jacob to deceive, had armed a brother’s hand against him. 
How Esau’s intentions could have been revealed to her, when the 
sacred historian expressly tells us that Esau but spake them in 
kis heart , must remain unsolved, unless, as appears most pro- 
bable. it was Rebekah’s own fears which betrayed them ; con 


PERIOD I. REBEKAH. 


99 


firmed by the manner of Esau towards his brother, and by hei 
own knowledge of his character. Ills strong love for his father, 
which to me is the redeeming beauty of Esau’s character, might 
restrain him awhile — but were the death which Isaac himself 
appeared to anticipate, speedily to take place, the mother’s 
forebodings well imagined that the haughty Esau would never 
Bubmit to bow to his brother, and call him heir. Painfully she 
must have felt, that not for her would Esau restrain his purpose, 
though the wildest ebullition of his natural anger was subdued 
by the deep loving reverence he bore his father. Might not she 
too have claimed that love, had she lavished on his youthful 
years the same affection she had given to his brother ? Was it 
not her own fault, that in this wild wish for vengeance, the 
death of the offender, he thought not of the suffering which 
such a deed would inflict on her ? That such thoughts were 
ascendant, and the voice of self-reproach more loud and thrilling 
than any anger against Esau for his fearful design, is proved by 
her counsel to Jacob — when calling him to her, she said, 
“ Behold thy brother Esau, as touching thee, doth comfort him- 
self, purposing to kill thee. Now, therefore, my son, obey my 
voice and arise, and flee thou to my brother Laban, in Haran. 
And tarry with him a few days, until thy brother’s fury turn 
away, and he forget that which thou hast done to him ; then I 
will send, and fetch thee from thence. Why should I also be 
deprived of you both in one day ?” 

There is not one word of invective against Esau. If she still 
supposed that her act was justified, inasmuch as it seemed to 
further the designs of the Eternal, Esau’s intention to slay his 
brother must have seemed too sinful, too horrible, to be passed 
without some comment either of anger or fear. But far 
otherwise is the spirit of her words. They breathe but a 
mother’s anxious agony — a consciousness that Esau’s wrath was 
but too just. Jacob had no defence to plead, and so avert the 
threatened wrath. Nothing could save him but flight, till the 
hasty but not placable Esau was appeased ; and from her lips 
the mandate of exile went forth : — •“ Why should I also be 
deprived of you both in one day ?” How affectingly do those 
simple words betray, not alone the love she bore to both her 
sons, but that her thoughts turned to the history of the past- 
foreboding Eve’s awful trial for herself! There is no wailing, no 
°5 


100 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


complaint, but in those brief words, what a volume of woman’s 
deepest feeling is revealed ! 

Her real emotions having thus had vent to Jacob, Rebekah 
was better able to control them before her husband ; and she 
said unto him, “ I am weary of my life, because of the daugh- 
ters of Heth. If Jacob take a wife of the daughters of Hetb, 
such as these which are of the daughters of the land, what good 
shall my life do me ?” 

It would have been the extreme of cruelty to ha.e increased 
the grief of the infirm Isaac, by a narration of Esau’s evil inten- 
tions towards his brother — when Esau himself had controlled 
his fierce passion for his father’s sake. Nor could Rebekah ’s 
confession of her fault now in any way redeem it. It would 
but have excited against her the anger of her husband, as being 
the primary cause of the dissensions between his sons — and have 
occasioned him increased affliction. It was, in this instance, 
wiser and better to hide from Isaac the sad cause of Jacob’s 
departure; and urge him to do that for his son of promise, 
which Abraham had done for him ; and the mother’s fearful 
anxiety was calmed by the paternal command, coupled with a 
reiterated blessing, for her younger son “ to go to Padan-Aram, 
the house of Bethuel, thy mother’s father, and take thee a wife 
from one of the daughters of Laban, thy mother’s brother.” 
“ And Isaac sent away Jacob.” 

And thus was the mother parted from the son, for whose 
beloved sake she had been tempted to turn aside from the 
straight line of probity and truth which in such guilelessness and 
beauty she had trodden so changelessly before. And is it not 
ever thus ? When we once turn from the one straight path, can 
we say, thus far shall we go and no further? Can we set a 
boundary to the rushing flood of pain and sorrow which, when 
we have removed the barrier of truth, obtains dominion, dash- 
ing our fairest dreams to earth, and bringing misery in the very 
garments of success ? And well is it for those whom the Lord 
so graciously compassionates as to reveal these fatal companions 
of deception ere it be too late, and the charmed path be trodden 
till there is no turning back. 

Who can peruse the history of Rebekah, and yet believe she 
was not punished for her sin ? Wherefore had she pursued 
luch fatal measures for the obtaining of the blessing for hei 


PERIOD I. REBEKAH. 


101 


favorite Jacob, save to keep him for ever by her sloe, even as 
Isaac had never quitted the tents of his father ? As a younger 
son, his lot would in all probability have been to seek his own 
fortune. As the inheritor of the blessings, vouchsafed to Abra- 
ham, there could be no need for him to leave her ; and what 
was the issue ? Banishment from his mother’s home, or expo- 
sure to his brother’s wrath, — the sword of vengeance ever 
hanging above his head. Was this nothing to a fond mother’s 
heart ? Let a parent ponder for one moment on the idea 
of one beloved child falling by the hand of another, and his 
heart will give the answer. Parting itself was preferable to such 
ever present dread, yet what agony must have been that 
parting ! 

Not then, as now, might the absent ones be united by mutual 
intelligence. Neither post nor traveller passed between Beer- 
sheba and Padan-Aram. Long weary wastes of country 
stretched between, and though Rebekah’s command was, 
“ Tarry there a few days,” she knew it must be long months ere 
they met again. Nor will the vague thought of the hour of 
meeting ever lessen the pang of parting. It is the pang itself 
which is felt, the looking in vain for the beloved form in its 
accustomed haunts, the wild yearning to list once more the 
voice which sounds in memory alone, to feel the fond pressure 
of the hand, the kiss which welcomed morning and evening, 
without which day seemed scarce begun, and night came unob- 
served. The pictured hardships of the lonely wanderer which 
no mother’s hand may soften, the woe unsoothed, the pain 
unhealed, the tired frame untended, — these, and a hundred 
other fears, and thoughts of suffering, haunt a mother’s waking 
dreams, and nightly pillow, — felt not, dreamed not by the wan- 
derer, yet clinging to woman’s breast with a tenacity and 
anguish time only can dispel. And because Rebekah lived so 
many thousand years ago, shall we deny to her these feelings 
when the hour came, and her beloved one departed — departed 
and alone, with no manifestation of the fruit of that blessing 
which she had lured him to obtain ? 

With the departure of Jacob, the history of Rebekah 
concludes, for her name is no more mentioned. — Even on her 
death Iloly Writ is silent. We only know that she was buried 
m the cave of Machpelah, by the words of Jacob in Gen. xlix, 
31 . And from there being no mention whatever of her on 


102 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


Jacob's return to Hebron, we must infer that she died before his 
arrival, and never had the happiness of folding him to her 
heart again. How sad and lonely must her declining years 
have seemed without him who had been so long her stay ; even 
though her long dormant affection for Esau may have been 
aroused from the injustice she had done him — and he evidently 
sought, with a softened spirit, to gratify his parents, by a union 
with a daughter of his uncle Ishmael, — he could never have 
been to her as Jacob; and painfully and sadly must she have 
yearned for the absent, as the “ few days,” which she had pic- 
tured, widened into long months and yet longer years. How 
changed must her life have seemed, and changed from the 
impulse of a moment ; and as death neared — as she felt it 
might no longer be averted, and she had waited and prayed in 
vain to behold her son on earth once more — must she not have felt 
to the full, that, though the deception had been successful, though 
the blessing had been given, the means of its bestowal could 
not have been “ acceptable to the Lord ?” and had she, as we are 
privileged to do, beheld the life of trial and disappointment, and 
retributive deception, which marked the earthly course of her 
favorite son, this solemn truth would have been impressed still 
more. 

Yet the death of Rebekah was in all probability one of peace, 
and calm holy reliance on the infinite mercy of her God. He 
had chastised, but in the midst of chastisement had mercy ; 
the fury of Esau had been turned aside, Jacob been saved, and 
peace preserved in the household of Isaac. Her earthly idol 
removed from her sight, we may well believe that Rebekah 
returned to her domestic duties with that singleness of purpose 
and uprightness of heart which had marked her earlier years. 
The temptation to turn aside, the loving mercy of the Eternal 
had removed, and the mother, even while her heart bled, must 
have pronounced the mandate just. If in her youth, before the 
knowledge of the God of Abraham had been imparted, she had 
felt with her brother, “ It is the Lord, we cannot speak unto thee 
bad or good,” would she not — now that long years had been 
passed in his service — have felt even in her affliction “ it is the 
Lord,” and, without murmur or complaint, submit herself to His 
will 5 

Are we then, it may be asked, to give Rebekah the meed of 
•'jnmixed admiration ? to rest only on the good points of her 


PERIOD I. REBEKAII. 


103 


character ? No. Like all human nature, it was a blending of 
the good and evil. Had Rebekah been told that, ere her life 
closed, she should have acted as she did, she would in all 
probability have felt it impossible ; nay, ere her children were 
born, would have shrunk with horror from the idea of loving 
one more than the other. All we would urge is simply, that 
we are not to condemn her, as if the unfortunate propensity of 
woman, “ to compass by stratagem,” were the marked fail- 
ing of her character, and that therefore the evil not the rjood 
was ever the ascendant. This is the common error into which 
superficial thinkers fall ; and from such have arisen questions as 
to the morality of the Bible, that its holiress would be more 
confirmed were there no such faults recorded. If indeed those, 
of whom it so impartially writes, were thus faultless, it would be 
destined for the use of Angels, not of man. But not such was 
the design of the Eternal. lie inspired holy men to write that 
which would comfort and sustain man, when his immediate 
presence and guidance were veiled from mortal eyes ; and His 
faithful servants alike, male and female, were depictured in their 
virtues and their failures, with an impartiality and truth which 
were to be our hope in our lowly efforts after virtue, and our conso- 
lation in our weakness and our sin. Rebekah’s fault was one, her 
virtues many ; and therefore, while we abhor and pray against the 
sin , we can only grieve and lament that human weakness which 
triumphed in one moment of strong temptation over the 
virtuous strength of years. We dare not condemn and scorn 
that weakness ; for did we so, we scorn, and condemn, and pro- 
nounce judgment on ourselves. How may we assert that, had 
w'e been placed as Rebekah in that dread moment, we too 
should not have done as she did ? Can we assert that the 
promise of the Eternal would have been so strongly impressed 
within us, that we could have left its fulfilment in His hands, 
without one effort by our own agency to forward it ? Can we 
say that we should have gone to Him in prayer, beseeching 
Him to counteract the design of Isaac in favor of his firstborn, 
and rest contented that the prayer would be heard and 
auswered ? 

There may be some too, loudly and reproachfully to condemn 
that weak partiality which was the real origin of the evil, — yet 
let such take heed, lest they too should fall by the same weak- 


104 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


ness, foi they know not how their affections may equally be 
tried. Oh ! not in condemnation of our meek and gentle 
ancestress shall we reap the benefit of her example, and turn 
aside from her faults. If, even in her, the weakness of human 
nature once triumphed over the immortal spirit, what may save 
us from the same fault ? Will the purity of youth, the piety 
^f early womanhood, the truth and virtue of long years? 
Will these obtain such sway as always to be our safeguard and 
our strength ? Alas ! not these : it must be the grace of God 
alone, sought by constant prayer and utter dependence upon 
Him, — the constant watch over ourselves, — the knowledge of 
our own weakness, — that which most exposes us to fall beneath 
temptation, — the consciousness that there is not a domestic 
duty, — not a home affection, — not an hour’s employment, — not 
a daily path or nightly thought, in which sin may not creep in 
and obtain dominion, unless effectually guarded against by 
unceasing watchfulness and prayer. And to us, yet more than 
any other nation in the world, is this watchful care and daily 
petition needed. To Israel is intrusted the Honor of 
the Lord ; His chosen, His beloved, His witnesses, the record- 
ers of His ways unto man, the promulgators of His eternal 
love. How may we be lukewarm in His cause, when we are 
so called upon to exalt His glory? We are scattered among 
the nations as witnesses of the past and pledges of the 
future, and shall we with indifference permit others to claim 
the privileges which are ours, and assert that, until the epoch 
of Christianity, God had no witnesses upon earth ? No, 
O no ! Surely, individually and nationally, we shall use our 
every effort to proclaim our high and glorious descent amid 
the nations ! 

One point more, and we must conclude this memoir, already 
so much longer than we intended. It has been said, that as 
the Eternal ordained that Jacob was to receive the promised 
blessing, and that the “ elder should serve the younger,” it 
must have been obtained in some way ; and therefore the 
means of its accomplishment were of little consequence, thus 
endeavoring to remove all that was reprehensible in the 
conduct of Jacob and his mother. Nay, some commentators 
try to make her conduct proceed from a belief that her course 
of w acting was in such conformity with the divine prediction, 


PERIOD I. REBEKAU. 105 

ill ci t she determined at all lisks, and by any means, to secure 
the blessing for her younger and more worthy son.” * 

This species of reasoning appears as mistaken as the too 
violent condemnation of Rebekah, and so completely at 
variance with the simple, trusting piety of the patriarchs and 
their families, that we cannot at all suppose it actuating the 
mother’s feelings. Besides which, to think thus, supposes a 
pre-determination to deceive her husband, whereas the narrative 
of the Bible clearly marks it the impulse of the moment. 

Isaac, before his birth, was the child of promise to Abraham : 
the Lord had promised he should be the father of a multitude, 
and in him and his seed all nations should be blessed. Yet 
that very child, Abraham was commanded to sacrifice, and 
without hesitation he prepared to obey, feeling convinced, that 
though to him the means of accomplishing the divine promise 
were plunged in darkest mystery — if indeed his child must die 
— yet still that the promise would be fulfilled without any inter- 
vention of man ; his duty was simply to obey, and the promise 
was fulfilled. 

As the command of the Lord to slay his son was the trial of 
Abraham’s faith, so were the words of Isaac to Esau the tria^ 
of Rebekah’s. She ought to have known, from that very 
incident in the early life of her husband, that whatever the 
Lord has once said, He will perform, however mysterious may 
seem the means of its accomplishment — that though Isaac 
might intend to give the blessing to his first-born, his words 
would have been overruled, and the blessing reserved for Jacob, 
without any strife between the brothers or their consequent 
separation. But her faith was not strong enough for that most 
difficult duty — to “ wait for the Lord.” Woman-like, feeling 
was her weakness, impulse her guide, faith succumbed before 
these, and so left her unguarded, when its invulnerable defence 
was more needed than it had ever been before. 

Rebekah had perhaps some excuse for her momentary fancy 
that her course of acting was, from its success , acceptable to 
the Lord ; but we have none. The idea that human means 
are necessary to forward any intention of the Most High, 
cannot be entertained a single moment without verging on 
impiety, when we have the whole Word of God to prove b* 


* Philippson: — See Notes to Mr. De Sola's Bible. 


106 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


precept and example that He is as omnipotent to do as to will 
Man is a free agent. Rebekah had equal power to “ wait for 
the Lord ” as to urge her son to deception. That she chose 
the latter was human frailty, no pre-ordainment. He indeed 
permitted the fraud in appearance to succeed, because He had 
already ordained that Jacob should be the promised seed, and 
His changeless and all-wise decree might not be turned aside 
even to annul, and so punish the designs of sin. Rut that in 
no way exculpates the fraud. Had no deceit whatever been 
practised, the blessing would still have been Jacob’s. It 
matters not how ; it is enough to know that the w r ays of the 
Eternal are not our ways, and that His decrees require no aid 
of man. 

That human designs, however sinful, however contrary to the 
pleasure of the Lord, are overruled to further His divine economy 
— no one who attentively studies and believes God’s Word can for 
a single moment doubt ; but this truth in not one tittle renders us 
less responsible beings. That the Eternal ever bringeth forth 
and worketh universal good from partial evil, proves His loving 
kindness, His beneficence, His all-wise, ever acting mercy alone. 
Not that man is in any point acquitted, or that evil is a 
necessary adjunct to the bringing forth of good. The workers 
and the designers of evil are, individually, objects of displeasure, 
and will suffer the burden of their guilt. The doers of evil the 
God of Love abhors, even while His compassion overrules the 
deeds , and turns them in His hand to the furtherance of 
good. 

We are earnestly and heartily anxious to impress this 
important truth on the minds of our younger readers, who, in 
their early perusal of God’s Holy Word, may and will feel 
startled, that human weakness should not only be recorded, but 
its actions be permitted to succeed. Success is not always a 
proof of the Eternal’s approbation. The history of both 
Rebekah and Jacob proves the displeasure of the Lord towards 
t/i£mselves individually, though their action was overruled to 
the accomplishment of His previous will. Rebekah never saw 
her son again ; and Jacob, though spiritually blessed , was in his 
earthly career more unfortunate than any of his family before 
or after him. 

This narrative alone, then, ought to bid us eschew a. 
wandering from the one straight path of single-hearted truth 


PERIOD I. LEAII AND RACHEL. 


10*2 


that we never can do so without exciting the displeasure of our 
Heavenly Father, even though our plans may seem crowned 
with unmerited success. The attribute of our God is truth : 
how then dare we believe that He smiles upon those who 
depart from it, or requires human deception to forward His 
almighty will ? As His children, His own, His first-born, oh ! let 
our watchword be truth ! Let our upright, single-minded, 
straightforward adherence to truth in every thought, word, and 
deed, proclaim whose witnesses w 7 e are, and compel the 
nations to acknowledge that we are “ Israelites indeed ! ” 


CHAPTER IV. 

I E A H AND RACHEL. 

It was on the same spot, in the land of the East, where nearly 
a century previous Abraham’s steward had bowed himself to the 
earth in prayer, that several shepherds and their flocks were 
assembled, grouped by the side of a well, from whose mouth 
the great stone covering had not vet been rolled aside. It was 
high noon, when a stranger approached, and courteously 
addressing the shepherds, inquired : “My brethren, whence be 
ye ? A nd they said, Of Haran are we. And he said unto 
them, Know ye Laban, the son of Nahor ? And they said, We 
know him. And he said unto them, Is he well ? And they 
said, He is well, and behold Rachel his daughter cometh with 
the sheep. And while he yet spake with them Rachel came 
with her father’s sheep, for she kept them. And it came to pass 
when Jacob saw Rachel, the daughter of Laban his mother’s 
brother, and the sheep of Laban his mother’s brother, that Jacob 
went near, and rolled the stone from the well’s mouth, and 
watered the sheep ; and Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted up his 
voice and wept, and Jacob told Rachel that he was her father’s 
brother, and that he was Rebekah’s son. And she ran and tob 
her father.” 


108 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


Such, in the simple yet impressive language of Holy Writ* 
was the first meeting of Jacob and his beautiful cousin. 

Lonely and sad the exiled Jacob had turned from the home 
of his childhood and the parents of his love. The child of 
promise and of prayer — the inheritor of God’s especial blessing 
— the ancestor of kings — was compelled to make his bed on the 
cold earth, with nothing but stones for his pillow. How must 
bis thoughts have clung to his mother and his homo! That 
his heart was once more fitted for the reception and comprehen- 
sion of holy things, is proved by the dream which Infinite 
Wisdom vouchsafed, to strengthen and encourage him. The 
promise would not have been revealed to one unworthy to receive 
it. Though human weakness may sully and darken even the 
choicest servants of the Lord, yet not unto the impure, the 
unholy, the unrepentant, would the Holy One impart the bless- 
ing of His spirit and His guidance. Acknowledgment of his 
fault must have brought Jacob once more to the feet of his 
Heavenly Father, or the confirmation of the blessed promise 
would have still been delayed. 

On the beautiful, the most consoling vision vouchsafed to 
Jacob, consoling, not only to him but to us, we may not linger. 
Yet, though so spiritually consoled, strengthened, and refreshed, 
the mortal nature of the wanderer must often have obtained 
ascendency during his journey, and have rendered it at the very 
least dreary and sad. Jacob had never been tried till his 
departure from his father’s house ; and, therefore, though awe- 
struck and “ afraid” at the glorious revelation when its impression 
was vividly before him, his very vow supposes a slight degree 
of doubt, natural to one only just called upon to believe: “ If 
the Lord will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I 
go, give me bread to eat and raiment to put on , so that I come 
again to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my 
God.” “ Bread to eat and raiment to put on.” Even for these 
petty cares and trials he was dependent on the Lord alone ; yet 
that he did not possess even these — that he had literally left 
the tent of his father with his staff for his sole possession, may 
give us some idea of the human trials of our forefathers, even 
of those whom the Lord most blessed. Their greatness, their 
influence, their riches, were to come from God alone , not from 
man ; their lives were to bear witness to His providence, even as 
'heir descendants are witnesses of the fulfilment of H ; s word. 


PERIOD I . L E A II AND RACHEL. 


109 


As Jacob was subject to all the inconveniences, fatigue, and 
suffering of travelling through a strange and often hostile 
country, as any other wanderer — his feelings, on nearing the 
abode of his uncle, may more easily be imagined than described. 
In his conversation with the shepherds, and then in his actively 
rolling aside the stone and watering the sheep, we may read 
the manly effort to restrain emotion, which, however, spurned 
all control when, in the simple and beautiful affection of the 
patriarchal age, “ he kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice and 
wept.” Wept, that God had in His loving mercy guided 
him thus far, and seemed to promise that newly known, yet 
instinctively loved, relations should fill up the aching void in 
his heart, which the sudden separation from his mother must 
have caused. 

“ And it came to pass, when Laban heard the tidings of 
Jacob, his sister’s son, that he ran to meet him, and embraced 
him, and kissed him, and brought him to his house. And he 
told Laban all these things. And Laban said, Surely thou 
art my bone and my flesh. And he abode with him the 
space of a month.” Again is family affection vividly brought 
before us. 

If the reckoning of some commefttators be true, and Jacob 
was seventy-six when he entered the household of Laban, nearly 
one hundred years must have elapsed since Rebekah had 
quitted her maiden home. Yet how closely and fondly must 
her memory have been enshrined in the heart of her brother, 
and through him cherishea by his children, that Jacob was 
thus so warmly and delightedly welcomed, simply because he 
was “ Rebekah’s son.” 

Youth in Laban had changed to manhood, manhood to age. 
He had nearer and dearer calls upon his heart in his character 
of husband and father; yet still the memory of the “hand-in- 
hand companion of his childhood” remained pure, and beautiful, 
and strong, as if absence had never come between them. Will 
not this fact reveal how acceptable in the Lord’s sight is the 
encouragement of those affections which His love has given to 
his children ? And how sad, how wrong it is to permit coldness 
and indifference to steal in between the members of one family. 
Would Laban have entertained such fond recollections of 
Rebekah, had their early youth been passed in that utter want 
of cordiality and confidence, faithfulness and affection, which 


110 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


but too often mar the unity and beauty of modern fiishionable 
homes ? Oh ! not to be expended only on the stranger, hath the 
God of love stored our hearts with affection, with reverence, 
with all that can make home an earthly heaven ! Would we 
truly love and seek to please Him, our first duty must be, to 
love and make those happy with whom our daily lot is cast. 

Two daughters blessed the house of Laban ; the elder Leah, 
the younger Rachel. Now “ Leah was tender-eyed, and 
Rachel beautiful and well-favored.” As the sacred historian 
disdains not to mention this, we may be permitted to pause one 
moment upon the characteristics of the two sisters. That Leah 
was much less beautiful than her sister is evident from the 
words of the text, but it does not appear that she was as plain 
and homely as some commentators declare her. The Hebrew 
word translated “ tender,” “ And the eyes of Leah were tender 
(VriS'y nxb does not signify weak only, as is generally 

supposed, but soft and delicate, and leads me to suppose that 
the soft and tender eyes of Leah were her only good feature, 
whereas her younger sister was “ very beautiful and of exceed- 
ing beauty,” which is the literal meaning of the Hebrew expres- 
sion nnvi Jrrji n&^l though even such 

translation is far from possessing the force of the original. This 
difference of appearance occasioned, as would appear by the 
sequel, a complete difference of character. 

One month Jacob abode with his uncle, evidently doing him 
active service in return for the hospitality which he had 
received. That he did so, tells well for the real character of the 
wanderer ; for in his father’s house Jacob had never been 
accustomed to active service, and it must have demanded some 
little exertion of will over inclination, to have permitted its 
steady and active performance. Laban, however, at this period 
of their intimacy, felt too kindly and generously towards his 
nephew to permit him to work without wages. “ And he said 
unto him, Because thou art my brother, shouldst thou therefore 
serve me for naught ? Tell me what shall thy wages be ? And 
Jacob loved Rachel, and said, 1 will serve thee seven years foi 
Rachel thy younger daughter. And Laban said, It is better 
1 give her unto thee than to another man. Abide with me. 
And Jacob served seven years for Rachel ; and they seemed unto 
lim but a few days, for the love he had to her." 


1‘EKIOD I. LEAH AND RACHEL. Ill 


We think much of those tales of chivalry where man performs 
some great and striking deed — conquers his own passions— 
becomes a voluntary wanderer — all to win the smile and love 
of woman. And we do right, for the motive is pure and the 
moral good. But such high-wrought volumes should not blind 
our hearts and eyes to this exquisite narration, wherein the same 
truth, the same moral is impressed, with equal force and beauty, 
only in the simple language of the Bible. Jacob’s servitude 
was a more convincing proof of his love and constancy than 
those exciting deeds of heroism which chivalry records. His 
was no service to call upon distant lands and far-off ages to 
admire. Nothing for fame, that brilliant meteor, which, 
equally with love, divided the warrior’s heart in the middle 
ages. Nothing to vary the routine of seven years’ domestic 
duty, the wearisome nature of which we find in the 38th and 
39th verses of chapter xxxi. Yet these “ seven years seemed 
but as a few days for the love he had to her .” A brief yet 
most emphatic sentence, revealing the purest, the holiest, the 
most unselfish love, unrestrained by one fleeting thought of 
worldly aggrandizement, or a hope beyond making that beloved 
one his own. “ Consumed by the draught by day, chilled by 
the frost at night,” still he never wavered. Love was his 
upholder — his sustainer. And it was for this end love was so 
mercifully given. 

As the word of God disdains not to portray the extent of 
iove borne by one mortal for another, we trust we may be par- 
doned if we linger a moment on that emotion, the very name 
of wh.ch is generally banished from the education of young 
females, as if to feel or excite it were a crime, forgetting that, in 
banishing all idea of its influence, we banish also the proper 
means of regulating that influence, and subject our young charge 
unguarded to the very evil that we dread. 

God gave not love to bind to earth, but to raise to heaven : 
not to make us earthly idols, but, on the very love we bear each 
other, to lift up the soul to Him — to lighten toil and soften grief, 
to heighten joy and bless our earthly sojourn with a bright ray 
from that exhaustless fount of love which waits for us above. 
Without some emotion powerful enough to draw us out of our- 
selves for an earthly brother, how could we ever subject our 
selfish hearts to the will of our God ? how perform those self- 
sacrifices most acceptable to Him ? Stronger than pain and 


112 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


toil, and even death, it is the very essence of our being, the 
spiritual essence, which marks more powerfully than aught else 
our immortal destiny ; and from the reflection of that destiny 
lends a glow to earth. “ Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart, and soul, and might,” is the command of the 
Eternal — an important command — yet not given till after His 
word had revealed to us that it was possible, nay, that it was a 
necessary consequence, for those who served and loved Him 
best, to love and cleave unto each other. Had not the heart 
been created with full capacity to love, this command would 
not have been given ; and He who has placed us in a world of 
beauty, who has gathered around us objects to excite every 
feeling, demands not that those feelings are to be devoted to 
Him alone in utter neglect of our fellows. 

It is not passion to which we allude, though but too often the 
words are deemed synonymous. Nor do we mean passion when 
we say that love is the handmaid of religion. No, it is a spirit- 
ual, not an earthly feeling ; spiritual even when it relates to 
man, not God. And if, indeed, it be so, and the more we 
reflect upon it the more we feel it is, or ought to be , why should 
it be a subject, as it too often is, of jest, of scorn, and those under 
its influence deemed not far removed from folly and romance? 
Why should education never allude to it save as a dreadful and 
unlikely thing, and. the sage lesson so often conned, that reason, 
not affection, v is to be our guide? Were the word religion sub- 
stituted for reason in such educational codes, the young heart 
would be so trained as to eschew all fear of mere earthly love ; 
it would know itself, its own impulses, its own feelings, and so 
set a strong guard upon those most likely to lead to error, while 
it encouraged all that would urge to good. It would feel that 
love was of God, and therefore not a subject for levity or jest ; 
— that it was sent to lift up the spirit to Him, and therefore not 
so to expend its force on an earthly idol as to lead to extrava- 
gance and folly ; — that it was to last for ever, not unto death , but 
beyond it, and therefore not to be given to one whose future 
was of earth, and who sought in its possession but the gratifica- 
tion of a few fleeting years ; — that it was to endure through 
sorrow and sickness, and trial and woe, not to be the mere har- 
binger of gaiety and joy, to shine in a ball-room and glitter in 
a bridal robe ; — but to bear with occasional irritability or even 
with unkindness and apparent neglect* with faults which wc 


PERIOD I. LEAH AND RACHEL. 


113 


must never breathe ; with intervals of an utter want of sympa- 
thy, even of depreciation, which we must endure, solace, and 
forgive: — not to suppose that we shall ever be as when that 
love is first called forth, our wishes granted ere. told, our every 
feeling answered, our every virtue appreciated, our very failings 
loved. And to be prepared for this — to love thus with a 
strength, a purity that will bear all this, aye, and more painful 
still, the very sacrifices of self which love impels, unfelt, unknown, 
uncared for, or if seen, but deemed our duty, and coldly passed 
uncheered — will aught but that love which is spiritual sustain 
us ? and will such emotion come to the young heart without 
some preparatory training ? Oh ! not while love is deemed 
romance, not while it is made a jest, or shunned as something 
guilty or derogatory, will it, can it ever be as the God of love 
ordained, the purest, dearest blessing earth can know, the love- 
liest type of heaven. 

Something more than Rachel’s beauty, marvellous as that 
was, must have so retained Jacob’s love for her in those seven 
years of domestic intercourse, as to make the time appear but a 
few days. Beauty may attract and win if the time of courtship 
be too brief to require no other charm, but it is not sufficient of 
itself to retain affection. Gift from God, as it is, how may it be 
abused, and how may it be wasted in caring only for the lovely 
shape without , and leaving the rich invisible gems within un- 
cared for and unused ! Oh ! if there be one among my youthful 
readers, of beauty exceeding as that of Rachel, who holdeth in 
her possession this rich gift of God, let her remember that He 
will demand of her how she hath used it, — that its abuse, its 
pn tended neglect, yet in reality proud value, will pass not un- 
noticea by its beneficent Giver. It has been granted for some 
end, — for if to look on a beautiful flower will excite emotions of 
admiration and love, and consequently enjoyment, how much 
more deeply would such feelings be called forth by a beautiful 
face, could we but behold it as the hands of God had formed it, 
unshaded by the impress of those emotions of pride, contempt 
or self-sufficiency, or that utter void of intellect, which are but 
too often its concomitants, from the mistaken notion thai out- 
ward beauty is omnipotent, and needs no help within. 

To hide from a young girl that she is beautiful is the extreme 
of folly, for her mirror will tell her that she is being deceived, 
and the influence of such informers will be lost at once No-— 


114 


THE WOMEN OP ISRAEL. 


let the real value and consequent responsibility of beaut}? be 
inculcated, and there will be no fear of its abuse. 

That Rachel had many most endearing qualities we may 
quite infer from Jacob’s devoted love to her even to her death. 
The spirit most impatient under contradiction, and loving its 
own will, is often united to a manner so engaging, and qualities 
so calculated to win regard, that trivial faults of temper and will 
are literally engendered from the difficulty it is to reprove a 
being so beautiful and so beloved ; and this would seem the 
case with Rachel. Young, joyous, and loving, we may fancy 
her the very star of her father’s home, valuing her beauty as it 
gave her power to obtain whatever she willed uncontradicted, 
but using it only in the sphere of home. 

But though Jacob’s affections were devoted to me alone, 
those seven years of intimate association must have been fraught 
wdth suffering and sadness to Laban’s elder daughter, whose 
strong affection for Jacob the sequel will reveal. Her compelled 
agency in her father’s fraud must have been fraught with 
absolute horror to a heart that loved secretly and unreturned, 
as herself, and heightened the trial of unrequited affection in no 
ordinary degree. 

We will not linger on the affairs narrated in Genesis xxix., 
from the 21st to the 30th verse, because they belong so strictly 
to the manners and customs of the Eastern nations, that it is 
quite impossible to comment upon them with any justice, 
prejudiced, as birth and education cannot fail to make us, in 
favoi of the manners and customs of modern Europe. Yet the 
customs of the East have undergone little or no change ; and 
repeatedly w ? e find that, w'hich in the narratives of the Bible 
may startle our modern European notions, as strange and 
improbable, confirmed by events passing in the East at this very 
day, so that those very narratives would there be scarcely 
considered a history of the past. 

Though beguiled into another seven years’ servitude for his 
much-loved Rachel, it is evident that she had become his wife 
first , Jacob honorably performing the word he had pledged, 
after the wished-for prize had been obtained ; and not till 
those seyen years were completed, do we hear him utter one 
word of complaint or one wish to provide for “his owm house 
also.” 

“And when the Lc”d saw* that Leah was hated (lit. less 


PERIOD I. LEAH AND RACHEL. 115 

loved), He gave her children, but Rachel had none. Ar c! she 
called the name of her eldest son Reuben : for, she said, “ Surely 
the Lord hath looked upon my affliction ; now therefore my 
husband will love me.” What a volume of woman’s deepest 
feelings and the compassionating love of the Eternal do these brief 
lines reveal ! He who had, in His inscrutable wisdom, ordained 
that Leah should be tried in the fiery ordeal of woman’s saddest 
loneliness, unrequited affection, yet deigned to grant a compen- 
sating blessing in all the sweet, pure feelings of a mother’s love. 
Who that reads but this one verse can uphold that woman is 
less an object of tender love and compassion to her God than 
man ? Who can say that the Mosaic records are silent on this 
head ? The words of man to point out the proper station and 
value of woman we need not, for the children of Israel have the 
word of their God. And do we not still recognise the God 
of Leah ? His ear has not become heavy that it cannot near, 
nor His arm shortened that it cannot save. And though He 
may not bestow on us a visible and audible manifestation of 
His tender compassion as on Leah, yet we may be certain that 
He will grant us some compensating blessing for every joy of 
which he may think fit to deprive us. And even for those 
bitter griefs, which from their nature, their seeming selfishness, 
woman shrinks in trembling from bringing before her God, and 
buries them in her own heart till it bleeds at every pore, — Leah’s 
history proves that He will grant peace and healing. It may 
be that a wiser and kinder will than her own has flung an insu- 
perable barrier between woman’s heart and its dearest object ; 
and impelled her by all that is refined and delicate in her 
character, to hide deep from every eye the anguish which is 
her burden. How blessed then that even for such a grief there 
is the fount of healing waters still in the word of God — that 
she may come thert and read, not only the abundance, the 
fulness of his love, but that He has especial tenderness for those 
by earth unloved ! And as He gave Leah children because she 
was not loved, so will He grant such sufferers a peace, and calm, 
and joy in the consciousness of His unfailing tenderness, far 
surpassing even the rich and glowing, but too transient happi- 
ness of sympathy on earth. 

Leah must have known and loved the Lord long before tho 
event recorded, else she had not thus welcomed the birth of her 
irst child. Eight years of Jacob’s sojourn in her father’s house* 


116 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


hold would scarcely have been sufficient for her to know and love 
her cousin’s invisible God, had she not had some vague yet true 
notions of Him before. 

That Jacob should often have alluded to the God of his 
fathers, and narrated the wonderful manifestations of His provi- 
dence, and that such solemn themes should have fallen with 
peculiar impressiveness on the heart of Leah, and but lightly on 
the buoyant impetuous Rachel, may be inferred from die history 
of both. After the gods of her father, Leah has no hankering 
whatever ; her reference, in both her griefs and joys, is to Jacob’s 
God alone. 

By her exclamation at the birth of her second son, we may 
suppose that the fond hope expressed the year previous, “ Now 
therefore my husband will love me,” was still not realized. 
“ Because the Lord hath heard that I am not loved, He hath 
therefore given me this son also.” To many the repetition of a 
blessing renders it invaluable, and, iu the imperfection of our 
earthly nature, the continued disappointment of our dearest 
wishes would have rendered the heart callous, perhaps repining, 
at the very blessing which had before brought joy. But not 
thus was it with Leah: gratefully she received a -second little 
treasure from the hand of her God ; and, bearing again the pang 
of ever-blighted hope, she utters no wish of an earthly kind, but 
simply feels she has still the love of God. Another year, and 
another son is granted ; and we may trace a ray beaming even 
through her earthly darkness, in the new upspringing of buoy- 
ant hope — “ Now will my husband be joined unto me, for I have 
borne him three sons.” 

Whether, indeed, the fond wish w T as realized, and Jacob’s 
heart was softened towards her, must be but conjecture ; yet it 
would almost appear so, for, at the birth of her fourth son, her 
pious heart is satisfied with the fervent ejaculation, “Now will I 
praise the Lord.” Drawn closer and closer unto her God, with His 
every precious gift, she, who gave her first-born a name signifying 
“ the son of affliction,” gave her fourth the beautiful appellation 
of “ praise unto the Lord.” It was not only a gift of children, 
then, His love bestowed. He had brought light from darkness, 
He had turned her mourning into praise, and returned with ten- 
fold blessing her meek enduring confidence in Him. Shall we 
then, who may be in the darkness of sorrow and heavy care, 
ihrink from walking in her steps, and dwell only cn the 


TERIOD I. LEAH AND RACHEL. 


117 


tion which is ours ? Shall we not also look and strive for some 
olessing which can bid us too “ praise the Lord,” and lead us to 
behold light where all was heaviness ? There is no lot so deso- 
late which, if we seek Him, the Lord will not bless: not, 
perhaps, by the removal of our present sorrow, but by some 
compensating mercy. We must not suppose that seeking Him 
and loving Him will exempt us from affliction. No, for, if it did, 
where would be that heavenly exercise which alone can fit us for 
heaven ? Nor are we, as some enthusiasts would urge, to regard 
trials as jogs, and welcome them with gladness. When a ten- 
der loving parent chastises a beloved child to keep him from the 
paths of sin, would he feel that the chastisement had done its 
work if the little being received it with smiles and rejoicing ? 
Surely the parent would be more hopeful if the child were serious, 
and even sad. And is it not so with the afflictions sent from 
our eternal and most tender Father ? We may think that we 
surely need them not ; and our lives may even be, in the sight 
of man, as we ourselves suppose them. Nay, they may be num- 
bered amongst those whom the Bible gives us promise shall be 
accounted the righteous in the sight of God ; yet how know we 
what we might have been without such affliction ? How know 
we but those very sorrows, lasting but a time, are preparing us 
to be of those whom the Lord writeth in His book for eternity, 
who shall be His when He maketh up His jewels ? Of this only 
are we certain, that the Lord loveth whom He correcteth. Then, 
while like Leah we feel affliction, let us hope on, pray on, with 
un doubting faith, that one day we too shall cry aloud, “Now 
will I praise the Lord.” 

Very different to the meek submissiveness and gentle disposi- 
tion of her elder sister, is the impetuous temper and sinful 
feeling of envy which urged Rachel angrily to exclaim, even to 
her doting husband, “ Give me children, or else I die. And 
Jacob’s anger was kindled against Rachel : and he said, Am I 
in God’s stead, who hath withheld children from thee ? 

We have been previously told, — “ And when Rachel saw that 
she bare Jacob no children, she envied her sister.” Envied 
whom ? even the homely, the unloved Leah. It was not enough 
that God had endowed her with most surpassing beauty, and 
given her the perfect love of a husband who had proved, was still 
proving his devoted attachment to herself alone, by fourteen 
years’ hard servitude. It signified little that Leah had but her 


118 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


thildren, and that her own cup of blessings was filled to flowing 
over. 

In glancing over the history of the two sisters, must we not feel 
that Rachel ought to be the happier, as she was the more bless- 
ed ? Yet it was not so. Leah, with her heavy burden of 
affliction, was the happier, for she neither envied nor complained, 
but leaned upon her God — and in consequence, from Hina 
received consolation. Rachel could have had no such stay. 
“ Give me children, or else I die !” was the exclamation of a 
querulous, self-willed spirit, looking only to man, and depending 
upon him. Yet the knowledge of the Lord must have been 
equally revealed to Rachel as to her sister. Daughters of the 
same household, cousins of the same witness of God, — Jacob’s 
religious education and experience must have been imparted to 
her also. She may have even listened during the time for 
Jacob’s sake, banishing its recollection entirely afterwards, as a 
theme much too solemn and grave for her present joyous days. 
And are there not such even now, deeming religion and her rich 
train of holy and blessed thoughts, quite incompatible with youth 
and beauty, and who believe age is time enough to think of such 
serious things ? 

That her feeling and its expression were both wrong we per- 
ceive by Jacob’s anger and reproof. Loving Rachel as he did, 
it must have been something very blamable to call severity from 
his lips. Ignorance may excite our pity, but not our blame. 
Had Rachel been ignorant who had blessed her sister with chil- 
dren, Jacob would have answered differently — but her impatient 
words caused his “ anger to be kindled against her,” because he 
felt and knew that they must have come from a spirit as impa- 
tient as rebellious, and were therefore likely to excite the 
displeasure of the Lord. “ Am I in God’s stead ?” meaning, can 
I give you children if God hath withheld them. Words brief, 
but impressively proving Jacob’s individual dependence on and 
trust in his God, and which ought to have subdued and 
humoled the discontent and envy of his wife. But though they 
checked the querulous words , they had no power to change the 
inward feelings , and determined at afl risks, all sacrifices, to obtain 
children also, she followed the example of Sarah, and forced her 
husband, by increasing the number of his wives, to undergo all 
the miseries of a divided household. 

Yet. when Bilhah had a son, we find Rachel welcoming him 


PERIOD I. LEAH AND RACHEL. 119 


with such a joyful thanksgiving, and as a gift from God — that 
we might wonder at her former impatience — did we not know, 
that there are many who trace the hand of the Lord, and think 
they love and serve Him, when all of life is smooth and smiling, 
yet act, at the first trial, for the first cross, as if they knew Him not 
at all, and denied His power to help and save. “ God hath 
judged me, and hath also heard my voice, and hath given me a 
son.” Had she then prayed — and did she recognise in thought- 
fulness the answer to her 'prayer ? Or was her exclamation at 
the birth of Dan but a presumptuous supposition from a 
presumptuous spirit — believing without due authority that she 
had prevailed with God ? We have not sufficient authority in 
Scripture, to pronounce judgment one way or the other on this 
point, and must therefore leave it to the consideration of our 
readers. 

Once only do words of sorrowing reproach escape Leah’s lips 
towards her sister. “ Is it a small matter that thou hast taken 
my husband ?” Words simply expressive of the natural pang 
which must sometimes have entered her heart — when year after 
year passed, and still beheld her deep affections less valued 
than the lighter love of Rachel. 

Two other sons were born unto the elder sister ; and one 
daughter, a blessing which had never before been vouchsafed the 
patriarchs. Then it was, “ that God remembered Rachel ; and 
God hearkened to her and gave her children.” “ God remem- 
bered Rachel.” Had He forgotten ? no, neither forgetfulness 
nor memory dwelleth with God — for He is omniscient as omni- 
potent, knowing and perceiving all. But when speaking of Him, 
His dealings with His children must be expressed in language, 
and by images suited to their finite conception, — not according 
to the adorable and glorious, but unfathomable infinity surround- 
ing Him. He thought upon and hearkened to her — for such is, 
equally with remember , the meaning of the term — bnVfii* fc'Vrbtf 
"isni saw — words, how full of consolation and 

encouragement to Rachel’s female descendants ! Man would have 
condemned, and sentenced her to a chastisement of perpetual 
childlessness — for the ten derest mercies of humanity are cruel 
compared to the tender mercies of the Most High ! but He whom 
6he had offended by mistrust, forgetfulness, impatience, angry 
emotions towards her sister, had compassion, and not only 


120 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


M remembered” that she was a weak and yearning woman, bul 
“ hearkened” to her supplications, and gave reply. 

“God hath taken away my reproach,” Rachel gratefully 
exclaimed. “ And she called his name Joseph, and said, the 
Lord shall add unto her another son.” Could she have pene- 
trated futurity — well indeed might she have felt that God had 
removed her reproach ; for who that reflects on the angelic 
beauty and faultlessness of Joseph, can recall his mother without 
bestowing on her a portion of the love and veneration we lavish 
on her son t 

It is when bowed down by inward remorse for a conscious- 
ness of innate sinfulness, by the impossibility of realizing that 
perfect holiness which would guard us from approach to wrong 
either in act and thought towards our fellow creatures, or in 
mistrust and forgetfulness of God, that we should remember the 
history of Rachel and take comfort. There are some, who, 
unable to bear the sting of an awakened conscience, drown it 
altogether, by fleeing from every holy exercise of prayer and self- 
examination, and believe that as in this life we must be liable to 
occasional faults, it is perfectly useless striving, much less praying 
against them, as such prayer can be of no service, and is but a 
mockery before God. Some minds may bear this awful state — to 
others, the young, the deeper feeling, and more yearning hearts, 
it is a period of absolute anguish — which, without some spiritual 
help, is impossible to be sustained ; and so religion is cast off* as a 
subject of terror, of suffering, and the world and the world’s pana- 
ceas substituted in its place. To such, more especially if they be 
women, we would say, Come but to the word of God — and even 
for such griefs there is all we need. There the Eternal not only 
proclaims “Himself a God full of compassion, long suffering, 
abundant in goodness and mercy, forgiving iniquity, transgres- 
sion, and sin,” but proves these consoling and most blessed 
attributes, not only after , but before they were proclaimed. 
Rachel was more faulty than many of her sex, yet her prayers 
were heard, her affliction compassionated, her wish fulfilled. 
How may we then despair, or think that the infirmities of our 
mortal frame and the sinfulness they bring, can throw a barrier 
between us and our God ? It is not to the righteous alone He 
awardeth mercy and love, but to the contrite and humble spirit, 
with whom the “ High and Holy One who inhabiteth eternity 
Iclighteth to dwell.” With such proofs we may not despair, we 


PERIOD I. LEAH AND RACHEL. 


121 


dare not doubt, but we are called to Him as little children sorrow- 
ing to be forgiven , in the full consciousness how deeply we are 
loved. 

It was after the birth of Joseph, that Jacob’s fourteen years of 
servitude being completed, he said unto Laban, “ Send me away 
unto mine own place, and to my country. Give me my wives 
and children for whom I have served thee, and let me go, for 
thou knowest the service which I have done thee. And Laban 
said unto him, I pray thee, if I have found favor in thine eyes, 
tarry ; for I have learned by experience, that the Lord hath 
blessed me for thy sake : and he said appoint me thy wages, and 
I will give it. And he said unto him, thou knowest how I have 
served thee, and how thy cattle was with me — for it was little 
before I came, and now it is increased into a multitude, and the 
Lord has blessed thee since my coming ; now when shall I pro- 
vide for mine own house also. And he said, what shall I give 
thee ? And Jacob said thou shalt not give me anything.” 

And that agreement followed which has most unjustly 
exposed Jacob to the accusation of duplicity and fraud. It is 
supposed that his plan of placing the peeled rods in the drink- 
ing troughs occasioned the greater number of the cattle to be 
“ ring-straked, speckled, and spotted ;” and in that manner Laban 
was defrauded, and Jacob received much more than his due. 
That Jacob refused all gifts from Laban, appears to me to origin- 
ate in the same feeling which actuated Abraham to refuse gifts 
from the king of Sodom, “ lest he should say, I have made 
Abraharn rich.” Depending upon Him who had promised, “ I 
will not leave thee until I have done that which I have spoken 
to thee of,” Jacob neither could nor would accept gifts from man, 
preferring to work himself, and leave the issue in the hands of 
God. And this he did, and God blessed him with riches suffi- 
cient for his need. 

Can it be supposed for one moment, after mature consideration, 
that the cattle could have become ring-straked, speckled, and 
spotted, without the immediate agency of God, who had deter- 
mined thus to provide for His believing servant? Can it be 
believed that it was in the power of man, by however subtle a 
scheme in appearance, to create a variety in the cattle, unless the 
Lord also had so willed it ? Laban had not behaved as generously 
or even as fairly by his nephew as his first affectionate, welcome 
*»ight lead us to suppose. We know from the vows of Jacob 


122 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


himself, which Laban does not contradict, that, “except the God 
of my fathers had been with me, surely thou hadst now sent me 
away empty.” And we may, therefore, rest perfectly content, 
that in the affair of the cattle no blame can be attached to Jacob. 
He was but a secondary cause, whose scheme would have been 
entirely vain had it not been blessed by the Eternal. 

Increasing exceedingly in much cattle, and maid-servants and 
men-servants, and camels, and asses, the wrath and envy of 
Laban’s sons were excited towards him. And he saw that 
Laban’s own countenance was not towards him as before — cir- 
cumstances which must have excited mtfch human anxiety and 
fear. And then it was the Lord said unto him, “Return unto 
the land of thy fathers and thy kindred, and I will be with 
thee.” 

“ And Jacob sent and called Rachel and Leah to the field 
unto his flock.” And in the perfect confidence of love and 
respect, imparted all to them. “ I see your father’s countenance 
is not towards us as before ; but the God of my fathers has been 
with me. And ye know that with all my power I have served 
vour father ; and your father has deceived me, and changed my 
wages ten times ; but God suffered him not to hurt me. If he 
said thus, The speckled shall be thy wages, then all the cattle 
bare speckled ; and if he said thus, The riug-straked shall be thy 
hire, then all the cattle bare ring-straked. Thus God hath 
taken away the cattle of your father , and given them to me .” 

There is something to me peculiarly beautiful in this simple 
address of Jacob, spoken as it is to his wives. Not a word of 
reproach on their father, but the simple truth — infinitely more 
expressive of the wrong he has suffered than any violence or 
invective. All that has blessed him, he traces unfailingly to God. 
The whole of his address, from the 5th to the 13th verse of Gen. 
xxxi., demands attention from its revealing so much more con- 
cerning Laban’s real conduct to his nephew, and in what manner 
that conduct was regarded and overruled by the Eternal, than 
we can learn by the bare narration of the previous chapter. 
Our present subject forbids our lingering on it, except to say, it 
completely absolves Jacob from all fraudulent dealings with his 
uncle, while it reveals that he himself was the victim of deceit. 

The mandate of God was in Jacob’s ear, and every emotion 
of humanity was urging him to tarry not, but to flee at once. 
He had dominion over all his household, yet he waits to impart 


PERIOD I. LEAH AND RACHEL. 


123 


ais wishes and his fears to his wives : he will make no step in 
advance without their concurrence; thus at once proving his 
love and their equality. And, without a moment’s hesitation, 
Rachel and Leah answered and said unto him, “ Is there yet any 
portion or inheritance for us in our father’s house ? Are we not 
accounted of him as strangers ? for he hath sold us, and has quite 
devoured our money For all the riches which God has taken 
trom our father, that is ours and our children’s. Now then, 
whatsoever God hath said unto thee do.” 

Different as the sisters were in disposition, and placed in a 
situation most likely to create discord and disunion, yet when 
the interests of a beloved husband are at stake, they act in per- 
fect unity and love. There is no “ mine and thine” — words how 
often fraught with discord — but simply “ ours and our children’s.” 
Seeking even to reconcile him yet more to his flight — enriched 
as he was — by stating the simple fact, that Laban had failed in 
his duty towards them, by giving them neither portion nor 
inheritance ; and by having sold them to Jacob for fourteen 
years of labor. That which God then had marked as Jacob’s 
share of the flocks and herds, was but their right and their 
children’s. 

Yet it must have been a trial to both sisters to remove so 
hastily and unexpectedly with their young children from the 
home of their earliest years, without even bidding farewell to the 
parent they had loved so long, to their brothers and their 
friends, to venture on a strange and dangerous track to a land 
they kr.ew not, save that it was far away from their childhood’s 
home. We already know where Leah’s affliction always led her, 
and are, therefore, justified in believing that now, as before, 
prayer was the soother of her natural sorrows, and her confidence, 
that even if her father pursued them, he would not be permitted 
to work them harm. But Rachel could not thus realize the ever 
present, ever protecting arm of the Eternal ; and, as before she 
had sought human means to further her impatient wishes, so 
now does she bear away with her secretly “ the images which 
were her father’s superstitiously believing, according to some 
commentators, that by consulting them, Laban would discover 
their route, and so be enabled to follow and arrest them. It is 
scarcely possible to peruse the history of these two sisters with- 
out being struck with the beautiful unity and harmony displayed 
in their two characters — distinct from first to last, and each pre 
6 


124 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


serving her individual peculiarities. Thrown back upon herself 
from wanting the attractions of beauty and vivacity granted to 
her younger sister, Leah’s graces expanded inwardly and spiri- 
tually ; her yearning affections always strongest from never 
finding vent by being called for and appreciated by man. 
Rejoicingly and gratefully acknowledging and believing the 
blessed religion which told her of an unchanging Friend and 
most tender loving Father, she found in such belief enough, and 
could realize content in the midst of trial, happiness in the midst 
of grief. Such a character as Leah’s, from the time she is 
revealed to us, so perfectly free from all wrong feelings in a situa- 
tion so likely to excite them, is not natural to woman ; and we 
may, therefore, infer that her youth had had its trials, which the 
grace of God had blessed, in making her rise from them the 
gentle, enduring, lovable being which His word reveals. 

The faults of Rachel originated in the very cause which had 
been a chastening to her sister. Her own surpassing loveliness, 
while ever the theme of admiration to her fellows, so raised her 
in her own estimation, that it was difficult to look beyond this 
world, where she reigned pre-eminent, to another, where she, in 
all her beauty, was but an atom — a creature of the dust What 
to her was the love and protection of an Invisible Being, when 
she was so surrounded by the love and care of man ? What to 
her needed the tale of future happiness ? Was she not joyous 
and laughter-loving the livelong day ? With power in herself 
to bend all hearts, and direct all circumstances to the furtherance 
of her own impetuous will ? Such we must believe the youth 
of Rachel, when we see her repining that children were granted 
to her sister and not to her. We behold her secretly bearing 
away the gods of her father — whether from the reason mention- 
ed above, or from her own lingering belief in their efficacy and 
power, still equally reprehensible in the wife of Jacob. 

If, indeed, Rachel supposed that in removing the images she 
prevented her father from discovering their route, she very 
speedily found herself mistaken. Jacob had stolen “ away 
unawares from Laban the Syrian, in that he told him not that he 
fled; so he fled with all that he had, and he rose up, and 
passed over the river, and set his face toward the mount 
Gilead.” And there, seven days after their hasty flight, Laban 
overtook him with all his kindred, and sufficient followers “ to 
do them hurt,” “ Had not the God of your father ” he said, 


PERIOD I. LEAH AND RACHEL. 125 


* spake unto me yesternight, saying, Take thou heed that thou 
speak not to Jacob good or bad.” 

Anxiously and fearfully, according to their different charac- 
ters, must Leah and Rachel have awaited the issue of the 
conference. The number of followers argued ill ; yet the words 
of Laban were at first but mild reproach. “ Wherefore didst 
thou flee away secretly, and steal away from me, and didst not 
tell me, that I might have sent thee away with mirth and with 
songs, with tabret and with harp : and hast not suffered me to 
kiss my sons and daughters ? Thou hast done foolishly in so 
doing.” 

We may well suppose words as these, being fraught with 
self-reproach to affectionate daughters, that they had indeed so 
left their father. To Leah his next words, alluding to the 
“ trod of thy father,” must have been particularly and gratefully 
soothing. He to whom she prayed was indeed ever around them, 
turning aside the wrath of men, forbidding him to arouse wratn 
by “speaking either bad or good.” Holy writ does not indeed 
tell us, that Leah prayed in this instance ; but she who welcomed 
the birth of every child with prayer and thanksgiving — who in 
no instance had recourse to her father’s gods — was not likely to 
forget her husband’s God when his protection was so needed 
We may be permitted to believe she prayed; and can we not 
imagine the fervor of her grateful thanksgiving when she heard 
such words from her father ? And we may all experience this. 
There is not one who has addressed the Lord in prayer — the 
daily prayer for all things, who can say he has had no answer. 
And oh ! who would not realize the glowing of the heart — the 
burst of thanksgiving which fills it — when we trace his hand in 
the daily events of life, and feel that that which we have asked 
for He has given ? But to realize this, we must come to Him 
in all things. We must pray to Him in our hearts as well as 
with our lips ; we must think individual prayer as well as those 
public petitions framed for us. We must be in the constant 
habit of tracing all things to His almighty hand, and believe that 
his love is as deep, as pitying, for us individually, as his bounty 
is shown throughout the world. We must so commune with 
Him, that the hours of prayer will feel but the continuation, 
not the commencement and end of devotion. Did we but do 
this — bring before Him every care, and thought, and grief, and 
Joy, and doubt, and thankfulness — how many, many instance? 


126 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


of answered prayer would tlie briefest life recall. Then, oh 
how can we keep Him far from us, by withholding from Him 
the wishes which He alone has power to grant, the sorrows 
which He alone has compassion sufficient to heal ? 

On Rachel’s ear, the words which filled her sister’s heart with 
deepest thankfulness must have fallen little heeded, while those 
which followed them, utterly meaningless to Leah, must have 
been fraught to her with wildest terror, fearfully increased bv 
the instant answer of her husband : — “ And now, though thou 
wouldst needs be gone, because thou sore longedst after thy 
father’s house, yet wherefore hast thou stolen my gods ? And 
Jacob answered and said (in reply to Laban’s previous words of 
reproach), Because I was afraid, for I said, peradventure thou 
wouldst take by force thy daughters from me.” And then, 
with regard fx> the last accusation : “ With whomsoever thou 
findest thy gods let him not live. Before our brethren discover 
what is thine, and take it to thee. For Jacob knew not that 
Rachel had stolen them.” 

That she bad concealed the theft from her husband proves 
at once that she knew the feelings dictating it were wrong, yet 
had not sufficient moral courage to resist them. And now 
what must have been her terrors ? Not only was the plan 
which she had adopted to prevent a hostile meeting between 
her hither and husband, apparently about to be the very means 
of dissension, but if discovered, Jacob’s own lips had pronounced 
her death-doom. We know not if in the patriarchal times 
death was usually the punishment awarded to criminals convicted 
of theft; but it is evident that Jacob fully intended the criminal 
in his household to suffer even death for his offence, by the 
sacred historian so expressly declaring that “ Jacob knew not 
that Rachel had stolen them.” How could he suspect the wife 
of his bosom — his best beloved — of such theft as might almost 
convict her of idolatry ! 

Little did he dream whom he was condemning, or the miserv 
he would have drawn upon himself, had not the God who had 
promised to bring him to his father’s home in peace, here inter- 
posed, and saved both him, and for his sake, and the sake of 
His own great name, the faulty Rachel. 

Yet during the period of Laban’s search for the images, till 
the danger of discovery was quite past, how terrible must have 
seen her alarm, and how painful her emotions ! How different 


PERIOD I. LEAH AND RACHEL. 127 

from the meek quietude of a holy spirit, at peace with itself and 
its God, which throughout this interview was Leah’s ! Yet no 
doubt, true to the contrarieties of imperfect humanity, when 
discovery was averted, and Laban found not the gods, Rachel 
only felt penetrated with pious gratitude, and resolved to keep 
her fault more strictly secret from her husband than ever. 
Some commentators, I believe, accuse her of an inclination to, 
if not of direct, idolatry ; but we do not think that Holy Writ 
sufficiently authorizes such a charge. Superstition, the remains 
of childhood’s tales, which urged her to the course of acting 
with regard to the images already dilated upon, is not in the 
least incompatible with her recognition of, and belief in, Jacob’s 
God, even though the images remained with her until Jacob 
bade them “ put away the strange gods that were amongst 
them,” nearly seven years afterwards. As his household con- 
sisted only of those who had lived with Laban he might easily 
have supposed the strange gods theirs, and Rachel had thus an 
opportunity of resigning them, without causing her husband the 
suffering it would have been, to suspect her of having either 
stolen them at first, or harbored them so long. 

There is something very beautiful in Laban’s parting care of 
his daughters, when the somewhat warm recrimination between 
himself and Jacob was at an end. The heap of stones was 
raised by all who had met in wrath, proving their reunion by 
their united labor, and the feast which all shared in harmony 
when the work was concluded. “ And Laban said, This heap 
is a witness between thee and me. Therefore was the name of 
it called Gilead and Mizpah, for he said, the Lord watch 
between me and thee when we are absent one from another. 
If thou shalt afflict my daughters , or if thou shalt take wives 
beside my daughters (though no man is with us), see God is witness 
betwixt thee and me. This heap be my witness, and this pillai 
be my witness, that I will not pass over this heap to thee, and 
thou shalt not pass over this heap and this pillar unto me for 
harm. The God of Abraham, and the God ofNahor, and the God 
of thy father judge betwixt us. And Jacob swore by the fear 
of his father Isaac. And Jacob offered sacrifices on the mount, 
and called his brethren to eat bread ; and they did eat bread, 
and tarried all night in the mount. And early in the morning 
Laban rose up, and kissed his sons (i. e. grandsons) and daugh 


128 


THE WOMEN OF 


SRAEL. 


ters, and blessed them ; and Laban departed, and returned unto 
his place.” 

Thus were angry feelings calmed and soothed by a mutual 
covenant of love. While to the wives of the one, and the 
daughters of the other, how thrice blessed must have been the 
reconciliation which gave them again the dear privilege of a 
father’s loving kiss and parting blessing! We learn too, from 
this simple narrative, that even in the East, a multiplicity of 
wives was decidedly not lawful, and that Laban considered the 
rights of his daughters would be infringed, and so call upon 
him to come forward in their defence, even to break the cove- 
nant of peace, did Jacob take any other wives. Human nature 
is indeed the same in all ages — for as Laban spake to Jacob 
thousands and thousands of years ago, so would a father now. 
As truly as the Bible reveals the truth, the beneficence, the 
tenderness of God — so truly does it reveal and answer every 
emotion of the human heart. 

As our task is a record only of Leah the wife of Jacob, we 
must pass lightly over the events of the xxxii. and xxxiii. chap- 
ters of Genesis, which belong exclusively to the history of the 
patriarch himself. The wrath of man was again turned aside, 
and the blessing of the Lord made Jacob at peace even with 
his brother Esau. His doubts and fears, which must have 
extended painfully to the weaker nature of his wives, at news 
of Esau’s armed approach, were subdued by the influence of his 
prayer, and the long separated brothers met in mutual tenderness 
and love. They did not, however, long remain together. Jacob 
and his family proceeded to Succoth, and then to Shechem, 
where he “ bought a parcel of a field,” after erecting his tents, 
and “ built there an altar,” and there remained, till commanded 
by the Lord to “ arise and go to Bethel.” 

The period of these sojournings between his departure from 
Padan-Aram, to his proceeding to Bethel, must have been full 
seven years. The then tender ages of his younger children, and 
the number of his flocks and herds, in all probability prompted 
him to settle his residence in the first convenient spot in the 
land of Canaan. It appears strange that he did not pursue his 
way without any pause to his father’s house; but it is one of 
those subjects on which the word of God gives us no informa- 
tion, and therefore may be dismissed without wasting time and 


PERIOD I. LEAH AND RACHEL. 


129 


thought on what can be only speculation. At Shechem, Leah 
must have encountered indeed a fiery trial in the insult offered 
to her daughter, and the guilty conduct of her sons — Simeon 
and Levi. Here, as elsewhere, Jacob was punished by deception, 
causing fear an 1 trouble, as he justly says : “Ye have troubled 
me to make me to stink among the inhabitants of the land, 
among the Canaanites and Perizzites, and I being few in num- 
ber, they shall gather themselves against me, and slay me, and 
l shall be destroyed, I and my household.” 

But though punished for the sin of his youth by mortal 
anxieties and fears continually darkening around him — the God 
of his father Abraham, mindful of His gracious promise to that 
holy man, still watched over Jacob, and relieved him from 
threatening danger by commanding him to go to Bethel 
and build an altar there. The patriarch without hesitation 
obeyed — first purifying his household of all strange gods ; — and 
when “ they journeyed, the terror of God was upon the cities 
that were round about them, and they did not pursue after the 
sons of Jacob.” Then, as now, punishment fell not at once 
upon the sinning ones. They were preserved to work out their 
own chastisement in furthering the will of their God. 

At Bethel, God again appeared unto the patriarch, and not 
only reiterated the promise made to his fathers and to himself, 
but confirmed the change of name from Jacob to Israel ; that 
holy and blessed name which was to descend through thousands 
and thousands of ages, associated for ever with the mercy and 
the love and the glory of the Lord — given by the Eternal ; a 
mark of especial favor from the King of kings, expressing that 
as a Prince our father Jacob had power with God and with 
man, and had prevailed. Is there, can there be one amongst 
the descendants of this prince of God’s creating, ashamed of the 
name he bears ? Should it not be our glory, our pride — of 
which no persecution, no injury, no wrong can rob us ? Does 
uot its very sound teem with the wondrous mercies of the past 
— with the truth, the unanswerable truth of revelation ? What 
Bcorner, what sceptic can point the finger of doubt or denial at 
the Bible — while that name is yet heard in every corner of the 
globe, borne by the very descendants of him, on whom by God 
himself it was" bestowed ? The watchword, the banner of our 
cause, recognised as such in every nation, every land — the man 
or woman who feels ashamed to call himself of Israel, flings scorn 


130 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


npon liis God. Cheered and consoled by this renewed blessing 
of God, Jacob proceeded on his journey, advancing southward 
in the direction of Mamre, where Isaac his father then was. 

Ephrah was nearly reached, when the sudden illness of 
Rachel compelled the whole cavalcade to halt — and Jacob must 
have beheld with inexpressible anguish his best beloved wife 
torn from him, at the very moment she had increased his joy 
and her own by giving birth to a second son. When in the 
midst of bodily and mental anguish, she called his name Benoni, 
son of my sorrow, did she think of her own impatient words — 
“ Give me children, or else I die !” and feel that it would have 
been better for her to have waited for the Lord ? How may w T e 
answer ? Enough for us to benefit by the record vouchsafed, 
and feel His will is better than our own — and in impatient rest- 
less longings for blessings granted to another, we may know, 
that even in the very fulfilment of the wish, the punishment may 
fall. 

Rachel committed no fault in wishing for a child — her fault 
had been envy and its subsequent discontent. Years had 
passed, the very recollection of her restless discontent may have 
faded from her mind, but not from His whom she had by want 
of faith and gratitude offended. In His infinite mercy He for- 
gave, He blessed, for He called her to Himself ere the evil days 
came, and her beloved one was sold by his brethren, and report- 
ed for long long years as dead. He saved the mother this deep 
suffering, but, in His justice towards her and love to her descend- 
ants, He chastised by an early and painful death, the most trying 
separation of soul and body which human nature (so to speak) 
may know. Her husband, her Joseph — her new-born — sud- 
denly and fearfully the silver links of love, binding her to all of 
these, were snapt asunder, and she might know her place on 
earth no more. “ Give me children, or else I die.” Alas ! the too 
impatient cry was heard and answered ; children were bestowed, 
and with them death. How little knew she what she asked ! 
In all her surpassing loveliness, in the full possession of most 
faithful love, the destroying angel came and snatched her from 
this world. Oh ! will not this teach us to be content with what 
God has given, and restrain us from looking with secret envy on 
the richer (in seeming) blessings of another ? Will it not bid us 
beware of seeking aught of good only because it belongs to a 
companion, or because we fancy we have equal right to its 


PERIOD I. LEAH AND RACHEL. 


131 


possession, by the lesson that, even were it ours, we might have 
no power to enjoy it ? Death, indeed, may not come between 
us and its enjoyment; but that which we have coveted loses its 
value the moment w r e possess it. Will not the warm young 
heart shrink from the very anticipation of the sin towards God 
and man which discontent may bring ? Let us think mwe of 
our sorrowing and afflicted fellow-creatures, and less of those 
more blessed in outward seeming. Did we think on the 
bereaved, the physically afflicted, the poor, how could we still 
retain discontent of our own lot, or envy of our fellow-creatures? 
And oh ! if no other reasoning will avail, let us remember, our 
God is not only a merciful, tender Father, but a just and jealous 
God, who will one day, we know not when or how, call upon us 
to render an account of the blessings He has given ; and if we 
know them not, how may we answer ? Long years had passed 
since Rachel’s offence, yet He who slumbereth not nor sleepeth, 
chastised it in the very hour that the wish which caused it was 
fulfilled. 

It may be asked (as in similar cases of bereavement it, alas I too 
often is), Why, granting that the lot of the departed is blessed- 
ness, does the God of love so afflict the survivors ? Why did 
He cause such deep grief to His favored servant Jacob ? Because 
God loved him ; because His omniscience had seen that Rachel 
might come between Jacob’s heart and his God ; because He 
would demonstrate to futurity that, to possess His favor, His 
blessing, does not in any manner emancipate us from trial and 
suffering in this world ; because He would lift up our affections 
from the narrow limits of this world, He would make His hea- 
ven a dearer home than our earth, He would people it with the 
immortal spirits of those we have loved on earth, that we may 
look upon it no longer as a strange land ; but as the beautiful 
country where our beloved are gone, and where we shall follow. 
This is wherefore He bereaves, and therefore even in the bereave- 
ment there is love. 

There is no mention of Jacob’s grief; yet in the very silence 
of Scripture, in some points, there is eloquence, borne out, as in 
this case it is, by the deep love he bore towards Joseph and 
Benjamin. What can more exquisitely express the intensity of 
that love, than when entreated by his sons to let Benjamin 
accompany them to Egypt, he answered, “ My son shall not go 
down with you ; for his brother is dead, and he is left alone : i/ 


132 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


mischief befal him in the way which ye go, then shall ye bring 
my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.” “ He is left alone,” and 
yet he had ten brethren — alone of his mother, the patriarch felt 
— sole record of that beloved one whom he had lost, and how 
might he let him depart? Tt is impossible to reflect on Jacob’s 
intense love for Joseph and Benjamin, without fully imagining 
the suffering of their mother’s loss. Silent he was, for who 
might question the decrees of the Most High ? but faith and love 
for our Father in heaven do not forbid us to mourn. We are 
placed here to love each other ; and if we love not those w'itb 
whom we are in daily, hourly intercourse, how may we love God ? 
Without love, earth would be a desert and heaven a void. 

The death of Leah is not recorded ; we only know that she 
did not accompany the patriarch and his family to Egypt, and 
that she was buried with Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and 
Rebekah, in the cave of Machpelah. Left dependent on her ten- 
derness and love, the extent of which we know, Jacob no doubt 
lavished warmer affection upon her, after the death of Rachel 
than before. How gratefully her pious heart must have traced 
this tranquil calm, which probably closed her days, to her God, 
we may infer from the thanksgiving with which every previous 
blessing had been received. But, as her future life can only be 
suggestion, much as imagination may love to dwell upon it, our 
present task must be concluded. We have dilated already at so 
much length upon the characters of the sisters, and the instruc- 
tion and consolation therein developed, that we need add littlo 
further now, except to notice what has always appeared a remark- 
able manifestation of the perfect equality of the sisters in their 
position as mothers of that race which is to last for ever. Ten 
tribes are lost — not to be discovered till the day which will 
behold the glorious and stupendous miracle of our restoration. 
The two which remain to bear witness to the mercy and justice 
of the Eternal, and the truth of His w r ord, are Judah, the 
descendants of Leah, and Benjamin, the descendants of Rachel, 
from one or other of which every Israelite (except the represen- 
tatives of the Levites, who were accounted the priests- of the 
Lord, not of the twelve tribes) traces his descent. 

Shall we then dismiss the beautiful record of Leah and Rachel, 
which the word of God contains, as a mere relation, concerning 
an age so long past as to appear almost fabulous and obsolete ? 
Shall we not rather take it to our hearts, and, as women of 


PEIWOD I. LEAH AND RACHEL. 


133 


Israel, feel it is of our own ancestry we read ? Shall we not 
emulate the much enduring piety of Leah ; aud in all our afflic- 
tions — even in that of a lone and unloved heart — turn to her 
God, and emulate her rejoicing acknowledgment of blessings at 
His hand ? Shall we not take warning of the loved and lovely 
Rachel, and feel that neither beauty nor love — the dearest love 
of man — can afford us happiness and joy, unless both are traced 
to, and held from the grace of God ? That not in outward 
attraction — not even in human love — can blessedness exist, unless 
the vital spark, to give them rest and life and continuance, hath 
dwelling within , to lift up the whole soul to God. O better — 
far better — homeliness of form and face, with a guileless con- 
tented heart. Better — far better — a heart desolate of earthly 
sympathy, with the love of our Father in heaven, than beauty 
and grace and human love, the fullest, dearest, combined with 
9very worldly blessing — if these be sufficient for our need, and 
we pass through life without one thought of God. 


END OF THE FJK8T PEBIOD* 


SECOND PERIOD 


CHAPTER I. 

EGYPTIAN CAPTIVITY AND JOCHEBRD. 

We are now to commence the second period of our history— 
an interval, differing materially from that which went before, 
aud from that which will succeed it, yet of vital importance to 
the women of Israel. Their station is no longer to depend upon 
the changes of time and states. The protection, tenderness, 
reverence, and support, which in their varied relations of life 
they so imperatively need, no longer rest on the will of man 
alone : the God of Abraham proclaims Himself their Guardian 
and their Father, and, by innumerable statutes in His Holy 
Law, provides for their temporal and eternal welfare equally 
with that of man. 

The mother, the wife, the daughter, the maid-servant, the 
widow, and the fatherless— for each and all, His love and mercy 
so provided, that every social and domestic duty became obedi- 
ence unto Him, and woman was thus raised to that rank in the 
scale of intellectual and immortal beings, by the ordinance of 
God, from which her weakness of frame and gentle delicacy of 
mind would, had she depended on man’s judgment alone, have 
entirely deprived her. 

For the women of Israel were those laws issued which were to 
guard the innocence, purity, honor, and well-doing of woman in 
general throughout the world ; for, however other revelations 
may profess to be the first and purest, however the smile of 
scorn and unbelief may attend the mention of the Jewish dis- 
pensation in conjunction with woman, the truth remains the 
same, that as from that law every other sprang, so from that 
law does woman in every age, clime, rank, and race, receive her 
guardianship on earth, and hope of heaven. 


PERIOD II. JOCHEBED, 


] 35 


That this assertion will meet with scorn and denial on all 
sides, we believe — perchance even from those whom nationality 
and duty both, should arouse to its defence. Yet firmly and 
unhesitatingly we retain the position we have advanced, prepared 
to defend it from the same blessed Book on which it is founded 
— the Word of God. Much has been said of the wide distinc- 
tion between ancient and modern Judaism, of Talmudical per- 
versions of Holy Writ, of Jewish degradation of woman, and a 
melancholy list of similar accusations. With them we neither 
have nor intend to have anything to do, save boldly to assert, 
that if there be this wide distinction between ancient and mo- 
dern Judaism — if customs and laws derogatory to God’s 
changeless truth, and contrary to His holy Word, have crept in 
amongst us, — the dark and bloody eras of persecution are at 
fault, not the ancient fathers, who knew how to die for the.r 
faith, but not to sully or degrade it. And it behoves us, in this 
blessed age of peace and this land of freedom, to prove the fal- 
sity of the charge, to awake and manifest to all men, that tb* 
religion of the Jew is the religion of Moses, as given by tbo 
Lord ; and that if laws have crept in contrary to the spirit and 
the ordinances of his word, they are not Judaism, but the reru 
nants of an age of barbarism and darkness, when that pure and 
holy word was almost death to read. Oh! why has not Israe 
joined heart and hand in this holy cause ? Why has he no< 
borne, in charity and patience, with those who differ from him 
in minor points, and thought only how, by union, harmony, and 
love, he could exalt his nation and his faith in the sight of thn 
Gentile world, and prove that, however close and binding mav 
be the casket, the jewel it enshrines is still the revelation of th* 
Lord, the religion of the Bible ? 

But our present task has not to do with the nation and Juda 
ism at large ; it is simply to prove to the women of Israel the)' 
position in the sight of God, and their duties towards man 
The intricacies of the law, as commented upon and explained by 
our ancient fathers, are not for us. Woman needs only com 
fort, strength, and guidance, so simply yet so clearly given, tha* 
a little child may read and understand them ; and these art 
ours, alike in the records of our female ancestors and in the pre 
jepts of the Lord. 

Hitherto we have been regarding His love, mercy, and jus 
tice, as manifested to individuals ; deriving lessons from exam 


L 36 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

pie, and guidance from the Eternal’s dealings with His crea 
tures. Recorded in His book, we know that their lives arc now 
intended for our instruction and benefit, or they would not have 
been written. But God knew that something yet more was 
needed, for the religious training and well doing of His elected 
people ; something more than the mere history of the past, 
bright as that was with the wonderful manifestations of His 
presence in direct communings with His saints ; — and for the 
love He bore His faithful servant Abraham, it pleased Him to 
bring from the deepest darkness the purest light, and vouchsafed 
a law which was to last for ever, and through which not alone 
His chosen but every nation should be blessed. 

From the death of Joseph to a short time preceding the birth 
of Moses, Holy Writ is silent as to the history of the Israelites, 
both individually and nationally, except the important truth that 
“ they were fruitful and increased abundantly, and multiplied 
and waxed exceeding mighty, and the land was filled with 
them.” Though no law had been given, they were still, it is 
evident, a completely distinct people, retaining a pure religion in 
the midst of barbarous idolatry. With no ordained worship — 
no revealed ordinances — no appointed sacrifice, or priest; stih 
they were the elect and beloved of the Lord, requiring no medi- 
ator, either angelic or human, to bring up their prayers before 
God, and render them acceptable. Yet God not only “ heard 
their cry, but had respect unto them.” This is a point in our 
history too important to be overlooked, though it concerns Israel 
generally, not the women of Israel alone. It is very often 
brought forward as a proof, that we must now be wholly re- 
jected by the Lord, because the daily sacrifice has ceased, and 
many parts of the law, obligatory upon us in our own land, are 
scarcely possible to be observed in our captivity — the cessation 
of sacrifices and atonement offerings especially are perpetually 
insisted upon, as proving that unless we acknowledge the aton- 
ing sacrifice of Jesus, and regard him as our High Priest, we 
are lost temporally and eternally. 

The simple fact that the Israelites in Egypt had neither sacri- 
6ce nor high priest, though the former was already ordained, 
yet were still a distinct people, still the first-born of the Lord, 
and had power to lift up their cry to Him, and be heard, com- 
passionated, and answered, is a sufficiently convincing answer. 
Israel is now, and has been for eighteen hundred years, as he 


PERIOD 


I. JOCIIEBED. 


137 


was in Egy \ t, with the sole difference that there we were noi 
the captives of the Lord as we are now ; nor had we then a law 
to guide us, and by obedience prove repentance. We are now 
fulfilling the prophecy, that “ Israel shall abide many days with- 
out priest or sacrifice,” etc. (Hosea iii. 4) : but the same blessed 
word which foretells this, says not one word of our being utterly 
cast off, but repeatedly enforces the divine consolation, that wo 
have but to cry unto the Lord, even from the lands of our cap- 
tivity, to be heard and compassionated as we were in Egypt. 
We have no need of sacrifice, when God Himself ordained that 
it should cease ; nor can we have the head of the nation, alike 
of its religious, civil, and even military divisions, while scattered 
in every quarter of the globe. Were we to accept Jesus, in his 
blended character of sacrifice, atoner, and high priest, the pro- 
phecies wotild all remain unfu \ filled ; as we should still possess 
all these, instead of being, as the prophet so expressly declared, 
deprived during our captivity of 44 king, prince, sacrifice, image, 
ephod, and terephim,” Hosea iii. 4. 

To Israel in Egypt they were not given ; to Israel in her 
lengthened captivity they have ceased, until she be purified and 
chastened sufficiently to receive once again the visible manifes- 
tation of the Lord’s acceptance, their constant attendant, and 
which was forfeited by our rebellion. Yet still, even as in 
Egypt, we are the first-born of the Lord, and have nationally and 
individually, equal access to His compassionating love. 

A new king had arisen in Egypt ; one who knew not Joseph, 
and saw only in the Israelites, a people harmless indeed in 
employments and pursuits, but sufficiently mighty in numbers 
to arouse the jealous fears of tyranny : and the commandment 
went forth to afflict them, by weighty tasks and heavy burdens. 
But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and 
grew ; and, in consequence, heavier and heavier grew their 
afflictions, till at length the fatal command was given to destroy 
every male child at its birth. Yet even this was overruled by 
a merciful God. The hearts of the women designed for this 
barbarous office were in His hand, and he so softened them 
into tenderness and compassion that the innocent babes were 
saved by the very means adopted for their destruction. Finding 
this scheme unavailing, Pharaoh issued another command more 
fatal than the first, for it seemed not in the power of man to 
evade or counteract it. And in the power of man it was not. 


138 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


God alone could bring forth delivery; and therefore did He 
permit the deepest darkness to close around his people, that 
both they and the Egyptians might know the power to redeem, 
and the love to accomplish it, were in Him alone. 

The situation of the women of Israel, at this period, must 
have been terrible indeed. Their infants, born in the midst of 
sorrow, yet hailed, perhaps, as the sole blessing which they 
could call their own, snatched from them by ruthless murderers, 
and flung into the Nile. And where were they to look for 
redress — for pity ? Where but to their God — and “ He heard 
their groaning and from this very desolation raised up His 
own. 

The family of Amram, a son of Levi, already consisted of 
himself, his wife, a little son of three years old, and an elder 
daughter. The birth of Aaron must have teen attended with 
heavy sorrow from the tyrannical oppression under which his 
father and the other Israelites labored ; but dark as was that 
hour, it must have been almost joyous compared with the awful 
trial awaiting his mother now. About to add another little one 
to their family, how agonizingly must the shriek of torture, 
wrung from her sisters in Israel — marking every fresh assault 
of the Egyptians within their houses, in search of their babes — 
have sounded in her ears l Day after day, night after night, 
one or other dwelling of the miserable Hebrews was searched ; 
and ransacked, if no child were found. Voices of cursing 
and mockery mingled with the wild entreaties for mercy — the 
scream of agony — the wailing moan of impotent suffering — the 
feeble wail of helpless infancy — the sullen splash, that told the 
work of butchery done ; — such must have been the sight and 
sounds around the home of Jochebed, as she aw T aited in trem- 
bling horror that day which must expose her to the same. It 
came at length, and a fair lovely babe was born — a boy — whose 
first wailing cry, if it reached the ears of the Egyptian butchers, 
would be his death-knell. But the prayers of the mother had 
not been in vain. Her God was with her, endowing her with 
wisdom and energy sufficiently effectual to conceal her boy three 
months. But then, danger once more approached. Suspicions 
bad either been excited, or the increasing age and size of the 
child rendered the task of concealment no longer possible. 
Fearful must have been the struggle of natural terrors and 
spiritual confidence, filling the mother’s mind, ere the plan she 


PERIOD II. JOCI1KBED 


139 


eventually followed was matured and executed. Faith alone in 
a God of infinite compassion could have inspired a mode of 
proceeding apparently so fraught with danger, as herself to 
expose her babe to the deep and dangerous current of the river ; 
but even while faith impelled, and at times soothed, by the firm 
conviction that her God would save, natural affections and 
human fears must often have had the ascendant, breathing but 
of danger and of death. The future was veiled in impenetrable 
darkness. The fate of her child, even if his slender ark bore him 
in safety on the waters, must be one of suffering, or perhaps of 
starvation — for who would give him food ? Did she do right 
to expose him thus ? If he were to be saved, would not the 
Eternal equally accomplish it without this fearful venture ? 
Such would be mere human reasoning in woman’s feeble heart. 
But prayer gave her the needful grace and strength to listen 
only to the immortal spirit, and trust undoubtingly in God. 
Can we not picture the anxious throbbings of maternal affection 
as her own hand weaved the ark or basket of bulrushes, in 
which her babe was to be exposed ? Would not merely earthly 
natures have smiled in scorn on this feeble invention, and 
pronounced it futile ? But the mother of Moses had not such 
to increase the difficulty of her task. Her husband’s name is 
never mentioned in this proceeding ; for Amram, as the 
remainder of his miserable brethren, was in all probability too 
much weighed down and spirit-broken by their multiplied 
afflictions, to think of the inmates of his home, save with 
increased affliction and despondency ; nay, had perchance closed 
his heart against all love for his new-born, believing it was des- 
tined, as every other, for immediate death. He could have had 
no time to watch over it, and share his wife’s anxieties. To his 
mother alone, therefore, under the especial providence of God, 
did Moses owe his preservation. 

The ark was completed. Gifted with unusual foresight and 
wisdom for the task, Jochebed carefully daubed it with slime 
and pitch, that no water should penetrate within ; and with 
trembling yet still trusting spirit, placed her babe therein, and 
laid it on the flags by the river’s brink. To watch what would 
be done with it — whether it would rest there till some compas- 
sionating passer-by should behold and save him, or be indeed 
launched on the waters and carried from her sight — was indeed 


140 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


a task too fearful for maternal love. We may picture, with 
perfect truth and justice, her last lingering kiss pressed upon the 
lips, cheek, and brow of the unconscious babe ; her waiting till 
sleep closed those beauteous eyes, which, in their pleading gaze, 
seemed to her fond heart beseeching her not so cruelly to aban 
don him — waiting till slumber, light, pure, beautiful, as onlj 
infancy can know, lay upon those sweet features, those rounded 
limbs — making them seem like some folded flower, waiting but 
.he return of day to brighten into renewed and still loveliei 
existence. Would that day ever dawn for that sweet uncon- 
scious slumberer on earth ? Alas ! how may she answer ? 
Her look deepens in its silent anguish — its immeasurable love. 
Faith seems departing in that intensity of human feeling ; sh*. 
will look no more, lest indeed it fail. The light lid closes softly 
over the sleeping babe. She lays it amidst the flowering flags 
— looks once, once more. Does the infant moan or weep? 
How may she leave it, if it does ? No : all is silent, voiceless — 
the boy still sleeps — and she hurries from the spot — bids Miriam 
stand “ afar off,” yet near enough “ to know what would be done 
with him And for herself? — where, where shall she find rest, 
from the anxiety and suffering of that fearful hour ? Where, but 
at the footstool of her God, in whose gracious hand she has placed 
her babe ? What could calm that heart but prayer ? And how 
can we doubt one moment that to the mother of Moses prayer 
was her whole support, strength, and life ? 

Holy writ is silent as to the length of time which elapsed ere 
Pharaoh’s daughter “ came down to wash at the river ; and her 
maidens walked along by the river’s side, and when she saw the 
ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it. And when 
she had opened it, she saw the child : and, behold, the babe 
wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is 
one of the Heorews’ children.” How exquisitely true and touch- 
ing is this picture of human nature ! The simple words, “and, 
behold, the babe wept,” even in reading, seem to fill woman’s 
heart with a gush of tears. The utter helplessness, the innocence, 
the beauty of the poor babe, seem to cling to our affections, as 
if he were entwined with them by stronger ties than mere narra- 
tion. And is he not ? What woman of Israel can read this 
touching narrative unmoved ? “ The babe wept and, true to 

nature, Pharaoh’s daughter had compassion on him. Cold, ter 


PERIOD II. JOCHEBED. 


141 


hfied, hungry, the poor infant might have been weeping long in 
his bulrush prison ; but those tears, sad as they were to him, 
obtained his human preservation. 

The compassion of the princess emboldened Miriam to go for- 
ward, and respectfully to ask, “ Shall I go and call to thee a 
nurse of the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for 
thee ?” An address which would almost make us believe that 
the compassionate and gentle character of the tyrant’s daughter 
must have been known to the Hebrews, or the young Miriam 
would scarcely have had sufficient courage so to have spoken. 
This, however, must be suggestion ; the inspired nanative only 
enforces upon us the hand of God throughout. The same God 
who inspired Rebekah unconsciously to speak those words which 
answered the steward’s prayer, and elected her for Isaac’s wife, 
also inspired the youthful daughter of Amram to come forward 
and speak such words to the princess of Egypt, as, at another 
time, she would have trembled to utter even in thought. 

“ And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, Go. And the maid 
went and called the child’s mother. And Pharaoh’s daughter 
said unto her, Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and 1 
will give thee thy wages. And the woman took the child and 
nursed it.” 

What must have been the emotions of Jochebed, thus to clasp 
again to her heart her rescued treasure ! Not alone saved from 
present death, but future suffering and labor — restored to her 
maternal bosom, to receive thence not only his necessary infant 
nourishment, but such lessons of his father’s God and his breth- 
ren’s faitii as would render him invulnerable to the temptations 
and idolatry of the Egyptian court. Her emotions in parting 
from her child we might try to picture ; but on those which 
must have attended his rescue, his restoration, silence is most 
eloquent. How had not her simple trusting faith been reward- 
ed ! How clearly, how startlingly had the hand of the Eternal 
been displayed ! And how could she prove the grateful devoted- 
ness of her overflowing heart, save by devoting the child His 
love had saved unto His service ? Not even poverty and priva- 
tion had she to encounter. While her brethren were enduring 
the heaviest burdens from cruel taskmasters, she was receiving 
wages from the princess of Egypt for the nurture of her own 
tliild ; and well may we believe those wages were devoted to tha 


142 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


needy and the suffering — from her who in the midst of natural 
sorrow must have felt herself individually so blessed. 

“ And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh's 
daughter, and he became her son. 1 ’ But it was in those years 
lie had passed with his own mother his character had been 
formed ; his principles were fixed ; his religion obtained living 
and breathing, and ever-actuating influence. We know not the 
age at which he left his mother, but we must infer, from all that 
is narrated of him, that her influence, not that of his adopted 
parent, made him what he was. No lessons of Pharaoh’s daugh- 
ter could have endowed him with that feeling of patriotism 
which bade him rise up against the Egyptian who was smiting 
an Israelite, or interfere between the two Israelites, endeavoring 
meekly to restore peace. Had his early instruction been con- 
fined to Pharaoh’s palace, his very birth and race would have 
been unknown ; he would have imbibed only such principles as 
actuated the Egyptians, and could not fail to hav^ bowed down 
to their idols. Some very powerful influence mus* have been at 
work counteracting these evils ; and w'hat influence is so great 
over the susceptible age of infancy as that of mother or nurse ? 
and Jochebed combined both these endearing relations. Even 
after the actual task of nursing was accomplished, “ and the 
child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh’s daughter,” it 
appears to me more than probable that she was still retained 
near the person of her child, tending him even after he was call- 
ed the princess’s son ; and thus had frequent opportunities of 
inculcating those divine truths which, though no law was yet 
given, the past history of his people so vividly revealed. 

That Moses makes no further mention of his parents is no 
proof of such idea being but fancy. Of everything concerning 
himself he writes so slightly, so evidently imagining his personal 
history of no possible consequence, compared with the mighty 
and solemn matters intrusted to him, that it was not likely the 
days of his childhood should, be recalled and dwelt upon. Nay, 
he himself might have been perfectly unconscious to what influ- 
ence he actually owed his peculiar feelings as an Israelite, his 
gentle lovely virtues as a man. The work of a mother is silent 
and unseen as dew upon the earth : — the seed must be planted, 
watched, w T atered, but unless spared to behold it springing into 
flower, the hand of the planter may for ever rest unknown. 


FERIOD II. JOCHEBED. 


143 


Joehebed was parted from her son, years before this blessed 
reward could have been given ; his childhood alone was hers. 
Ilia youth, his manhood, when the seed she had sown might 
have repaid her with abundant harvest, were passed, the one in 
all the temptations, the luxuries of an Egyptian court ; the 
Dther in exile — the lowly shepherd of his father-in-law, a priest 
of Midian, — apart even from his countrymen. It does not 
appear that his parents were among those who left Egypt, or 
their names would have been mentioned with the other relatives 
of Moses. Joehebed had not the privilege of beholding the 
spiritual and temporal greatness of her rescued boy ; but had 
the seed of her sowing withered ? Were her counsels vain ! 
Can we not trace in the peculiarly gentle, much-forgiving 
character of our lawgiver, the moulding of a woman's hand ? 
Is there aught to prove the minion of a court, the favorite of a 
princess ? No, 0 no. The whole character of Moses displays 
a mother’s guidance. A mother’s love watching over childhood, 
and inculcating those high and glowing principles of virtue and 
patriotism, which the blessing of the Eternal ripened into such 
a beautiful maturity, as to render Moses a fit instrument in His 
hand to lead His chosen people from the land of bondage, and 
to reveal His changeless law. 

And what will not this beautiful narrative teach us ? As 
Joehebed, we too are in a land of bondage ; indeed, in free and 
happy England, not a bondage of suffering and persecution, but 
yet as exiles from our own land, and, alas ! too often, exiles 
from our God. We too are in a land of strangers, whose faith 
is not ours ; a faith which, though it be not idolatry, is fraught 
with yet more temptation and danger. In this blessed land, no 
cruel taskmaster afflicts us with heavy burdens ; yet there are 
some to look upon us with scorn and hate, who would strew 
our daily path with the thorns and briers of contempt, calumny, 
and abuse ; and others again who, with kindly yet mistaken 
zeal, would appal us by the vivid recital of the fearful precipice 
on which we stand, telling us that but one escape is left us, one 
only way, or we are temporally and eternally lost ; and that 
way no Israelite can recognise. Yet fearful are the temptations 
to seek it, and few, too few, his weapons of defence. Worldly 
rank and worldly honors are closed to the believing Hebrew, 
and wherever he turns he feels himself a stranger. 

Blest in this land with oeace and freedom, yet, ever and 


144 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


anon, the low growl of the tempest of persecution reaches him 
from distant shores ; sometimes sinking into silence, ere more 
than the heart’s quick throbbing is aroused ; at other* waxing 
louder and more loud, till the wailings of thousands, and the 
shrieks of torture, are borne on the heavy air, breathing that 
Israel is afflicted still. And wherefore ? To bid us still feel 
we are the captives of the Lord — that Jerusalem lieth desolate 
and waste for our sins — that the awful prophecy of the twenty- 
eighth chapter of Deuteronomy has been, and in many lands 
still is, in actual fulfilment — that we are now, as we were in 
Egypt, afflicted and oppressed — “ despised and rejected of men 
— a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” — “ as one that 
gropeth at noon-day, as the blind gropeth in darkness, that 
shall not prosper in his ways, that shall only be spoiled and 
oppressed evermore, and whom no man shall save.” 

And if it be so (and who shall say it is not ?), oh ! does it not 
devolve on the mothers of Israel to do even as Jochebed, and 
so influence the childhood of their sons, as to render them 
indeed faithful to their God, meek and forgiving towards man, 
and invulnerable to every temptation held forth by the opposers 
of their faith ? 

The very safety we enjoy, the habits of friendly intimacy 
which it is right and happy we should cultivate, all call upon 
the Hebrew mother to instil those principles in the heart of her 
son which shall guide him through life, and, while they raise him 
in the estimation of the nations around him, inspire him indi- 
vidually to glory in his own. 

We have enlarged, in a former work, on the duty of mothers 
regarding religion generally. We would here conjure them to 
follow the example of the mother of Moses, and make their sons 
the receivers, and in their turn the promulgators, of that holy 
law which is their glorious inheritance. Their faith, in England 
may not be tried as that of Jochebed — they may not be called 
upon to expose their innocent babes to the dangers of the river, 
to save them from the cruelties of man — but they are called upon 
to provide a suit of defence for riper years. They must so 
instruct, so guide, the first ten or twelve years of boyhood, that 
even then they may leave their maternal homes as Israelites 
rejoicing in their faith. They must infuse some balsam to heal, 
or some invulnerable shield to eject, the arrows of contempt or 
pity which, ere they pass through life, they must encounter 


PERIOD II. JOCHEBED. 143 

They must so lead, that graver years may conduct them to that 
only study, the blessed word of God, which alone can give peace 
to their spirits, rest to their minds, and conviction to their hearts 
— alike in their private hours and their communings with the 
Nazarene world. This is now the Hebrew mother’s task, which 
may be blessed to their offspring as Jochebed’s was to Moses. 
It is for this they must have faith, must trust that God will 
perfect that which is imperfect, fill up every deficiency, and bring 
the seed to flower, or vain and hopeless will le their task. 
They must impress upon their offspring their spiritual aris- 
tocracy, and so not only remove all temptation to barter their 
heavenly heritage for earthly rank, but infuse their minds and 
hearts with that nobility of thought, word, and action, which 
should be the heir-loom, the glory of every Hebrew, be he of 
what rank, profession, or even trade, he may. Persecution and 
barbarity in our opposers, and their consequent ignorance and 
superstition in ourselves, have for long ages so crushed and 
trampled on this innate nobility, that in all but a very few 
instances, it seems, and has long seemed, departed from us ; its 
banishment stigmatizing us as degraded to the lowest and vilest 
of mankind. Can we now then, in those blessed lands where the 
Jew may walk in freedom, with “ none to molest or make him 
afraid,” permit this stigma to remain ? • Shall we not rather 
wake every energy, string every nerve, to prove that it is not 
Judaism, but persecution at fault ; and that wherever the Hebrew 
is free, he is noble ? That the princely blood of Abraham, 
Moses, and David still flows within his veins, and incites him to 
thoughts and deeds as far removed from ignorance and degra- 
dation as the sun is from the earth ? 

But not when arrived at manhood can this nobility be 
infused. It must be imbibed with the mother’s milk, and form 
the very atmosphere of childhood and youth. Let every 
mother in Israel look upon her infant treasure as direct from the 
hand of God, and believe that He saith to her, as the princess 
of Egvpt said to Jochebed, — Nurse this child for me, and I 
will give thee thy wages for Him, for the Lord, who in every 
age, clime, and position, calleth Israel His Children. And let 
her indeed so nurse him, that whenever he may be called to his 
Father in Heaven he may be fit to go. Let her, weak and feeble 
of herself as she is, remember that with the Lord all things are 
possible, and that as He blessed Jochebed in the preservation 


146 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


and nurture of her child, so if we will but blend effort with 
prayer, perseverance with faith, He will equally bless us — and 
though it may not be ours to rear a deliverer from Egyptian 
bondage, yet how will the mothers in Israel rejoice and glory, 
to receive “ their wages” in the elevation of their nation by their 
cons ? 

To do this, they must be noble ; and to become so, let the 
Hebrew mother teach her boy, from his earliest years, to think 
of his heavenly heritage, his spiritual election, his eternal life, 
and leave the interests and ambition of earth till riper years, 
when even these dull sordid cares shall become ennobled and 
spiritualized, by the purer atmosphere which he has in his boy- 
hood breathed. We are not, indeed, while denizens of earth, to 
think so exclusively of heaven as to unfit us for the life of trial 
and temptation which, in our mortal career, we are commanded 
to tread ; but we are to infuse earth with Heaven, time with 
Eternity, the soul with God. As Israelites, we cannot sever 
our temporal from our eternal interests, we cannot fling off the 
memory of, and obedience to, the Eternal, for with every single 
relation, duty, ordinance, and habit of daily life His commands 
are blended. We are not Israelites, if we think to live apart 
from Him, or to do aught in which we cannot associate Him by 
the entreaty for His blessing, and the looking to Him throughout. 
We are not Israelites, if we do not feel our every domestic duty and 
loving tie sanctified by Him, and bringing us nearer, closer, more 
lovingly to Him, with every passing month. This is to be an 
Israelite — this is to be the aristocracy of the Lord ; for did we 
so associate our religion with our lives, we must be noble. 
13ut how can we attain this, how dare we hope it, if the pursuit 
of gold, the vain longing for wealth, the idle dream of worldly 
aggrandizement, the empty ri^alship with those richer and 
higher than ourselves, be the sole end, aim, and being of the 
Israelite ? We look with loud condemnation and scorn on the 
worshippers of the golden calf — we contemn the worshippers, 
more than we tremble at the awful chastisement from the hand 
of the Lord — yet let us beware, lest our sons too bow before 
the golden idol. It may take no form, we may not approach it 
with forms of worship, and priests, and incense, but if it fill up 
our hearts to the exclusion of all other and nobler thoughts, if 
its pursuit drag us from the house of God, from our own hearths, 
deaden us to the love of home ties, prevent the spiritual and 


PERIOD II. JOCHEBED. 


147 


enlarged education of our children, what is it to us but as the 
golden calf to the Israelites of old ? And how dare we hope te 
be exempt from the chastisement of God, when it fell upon our 
brethren ? Oh ! let us not case up our hearts, and pursue our 
way in confident security, because it is deferred. God works 
not now as He did then. Israel, in his redemption from Egypt, 
needed constant, visible, and palpable evidences of the provi- 
dence and the justice of the Lord. We have them not to guide 
ue now, but their record is ours, in which to learn our duty, and 
the effects of its neglect or disobedience. That which was dis- 
pleasing to Him then , is displeasing to Him now ; but, scattered 
as we are among the nations, deprived through our iniquities of 
the visible manifestation of His presence, His approval, and His 
wrath, not on earth may our judgment be known ; nor can we 
“ discern between him that serveth God, and him that serveth 
Him not,” till that day when “the Lord shall make up His 
jewels, and spare those that love Him, as a man spareth his 
own son that serveth him.” 

That the long dark ages of persecution originated that fearful 
indifference to all ennobling pursuits, of which the Hebrew is 
accused, we quite acknowledge. Deprived of all honorable and 
elevating employment, of every profession, of every trade, which, 
bringing them into friendly contact with their fellow-men, would 
have enlarged their minds, and awakened social affections; 
cowed, crushed, hunted down, and often persecuted for the sake 
of their wealth ; deadened, stupefied, to all spiritual elevation, 
even as the Israelites in Egypt ; was it marvel they should cling 
to gold, and seek its increase, as their sole rank and privilege ? 
For them God had compassion, for He knew how they were 
tried. It was natural too, that, even when in lands of compa- 
rative freedom and peace, the habits and associations of past 
years should cling pertinaciously to them still. But their 
encouragement is no longer guiltless — prosperity, peace, friendly 
intercourse with some of the nations, are granted us, that we 
may come back with heart and soul unto our holy law, and 
st rive with all our might against every idol which comes between 
us and our God. In England, France, Belgium, and America, it 
is no longer persecution and intolerance that degrade and pro- 
nounce us vile. If such feelings do find entrance, it is the 
prejudice arising from what we were. They, as is natural, see 
not the cause of that past degradation, but let us make it man! 
7 


148 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAJT., 


fest — let us evince, more and more, that gold is no longer om 
sole pursuit ; that fraud and cunning, which to the ignorant 
Gentile are synonymous with the word Jew, are as far from us 
as from them — that when free we too are noble, honorable, and 
spiritual to an extent that, if we adhere to our blessed law, only 
Israelites can be — and prejudice must pass away, and Israel bo 
acknowledged the witnesses of the Lord. 

It is this noble, this spiritual feeling of independence wo 
would beseech every Hebrew mother to instil into her boy ; 
and which we now humbly, yet earnestly, prayerfully, and 
heartfully conjure every Hebrew father to aid and confirm. Let 
not the ears of the infant Israelite be polluted by reference to 
earthly gain and worldly rivalship, but let him hear often from 
his father’s lips those sweet lessons of heaven and God — of selt- 
denial and its blessed reward — of those purer pleasures of 
intellect and heart, which, if not infused into his nfancy, oan 
never find entrance and dominion in after years. Ably and 
delightfully would such paternal lessons assist the mother’s 
task, and lighten the blessed yet exquisitely anxious labor of 
teaching their offspring their proper station in the sight of God 
and man, and so ennoble, purify, and spiritualize heart and 
mind, as to render them fit descendants of the princes, priests, 
and prophets from whom they spring. 

And let not such parents fear for their sons’ earthly welfare. 
Such training will not unfit them for the necessary cares and 
toils of life. It will but render them less engrossing, less 
worldly, and annihilate every feeling which they would blush to 
acknowledge before God and man. It will take from life its 
dross, its stagnating care, teaching them that their duty indeed 
is to work and persevere, alike for their families and themselves, 
but that in the hand of the Lord is their portion, and that He 
will order their daily lot as will be most fitted for their eternal 
welfare. It will remove every temptation to turn aside, for 
lucre or ambition, from their father’s faith. It will open heart 
and hand towards the suffering and the poor, and, removing 
every selfish feeling and grovelling thought, prepare them for 
that day when the Lord again shall call them His, and bid 
them resume that kingly station in the sight of the nations, of 
which for “a little moment” only they are deprived. 

The suffering Israelites, under the terrible oppression of 
Pharaoh, imagined not the rank to which they would be called 


PERIOD II. JOCHEBED. 


149 


by the word of the Lord. While groaning under their heavy 
burdens, toiling day and night, with neither relief nor relaxa- 
tion, could they have imagined that, in their persecuted 
offspring, princes should arise ; — that, in a brief interval, Chiefs 
of their tribes, Heads of families, Captains of well-appointed 
squadrons — Priests, sacred in the sight of all the people, and 
acknowledged by the Eternal — Workers in every elegant art, 
which was needed in the building and embellishment of the 
Tabernacle — Warriors, dauntless in bravery, and skilful in the 
art of war — Judges, gifted to decide causes, award sentences 
and keep civil peace and order amid a disorderly multitude — 
Princes, of such wealth and consequence as to make the splendid 
offerings enumerated in the seventh chapter of Numbers — could 
they have imagined that such would be ? Yet such was, and 
such will be. We know not when, we know not how — we 
only know that the word of God has said it, and that He is a 
God of truth. Shall we not remember this in the education of 
our sons, and infuse such feelings as will render them indeed 
but sojourners in the land of the captivity, watchers, as it were, 
on the frontiers, prepared to arise, and fall into their appointed 
stations, the moment the Lord shall call ? Let us welcome in 
them the inclination for the liberal professions, all that will 
enlarge the mind and ennoble the heart, and bid them prove, in 
the sight of the whole Gentile world, that where the Hebrew is 
free, he his brave, enterprising, self-denying, gifted, wise, 
magnanimous, as the noblest of the nations around him. Let 
the Hebrew mother give her boy the solid foundation of his 
glorious faith, and he may go forth in the Nazarene world 
unharmed ; and in other professions, other lines than that of 
merchant, in which alone till now the Jew has been known, he 
will honor the name of Israelite. 

And if such be the fruit of nursing her child for God, oh 1 
will rot every Hebrew mother feel, that she has indeed received 
u her wages V* 


160 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL, 


CHAPTER H. 

THE EXODUS. LAWS FOR THE MOTHERS OI 

ISRAEL. 

We have seen quoted in a Jewish periodical, “ that it was for 
the sake of the righteous women the Lord delivered our 
ancestors from Egypt.” Scriptural authority for this assertion 
we certainly cannot find, as it is expressly said, “the Lord 
remembered the promises which he had made to Abraham, 
Isaac, and Jacob.” We only quote it as a proof that the ancient 
fathers from whom we believe it taken, could not have had the 
low idea of women with which they are charged, to have put 
such an opinion forth, even in suggestion; but must have 
imagined the righteousness of women of no little importance 
towards the well-doing of the state. That so, in fact, it is, we 
have direct scriptural authority to believe ; as not only a review 
of the law will make manifest, but the consequences of the sins 
of the women in a more distant period. Were not woman an 
equally responsible agent in the sight of God — were He not in 
His infinite mercy tenderly careful of her innocence, her honor, 
her well-doing,' her protection by man — no law for her in par- 
ticular need have been issued, nor such especial care taken to 
cleanse her from impurity and guilt, to free her from false 
charges and an unjust husband, to permit and sanctify her 
singular vow, and give her every incentive for a chaste, virtuous, 
and modest life. This need not have been — would not have 
been — if the Eternal had not, in His compassionating love, 
regarded His frailer, weaker children with even more tenderness 
than He looked on man, and resolved on fixing her station and 
her privileges, and so bringing her forward as an object at once 
af tenderness and respect — of cherishing, as a wife and 
daughter — of the deepest veneration, as a mother — the especial 
object of national as well as individual love and protection, as 
widowed and fatherless — and of the kindest, most fatherly care 
And gentleness, as the maid-servant. Nay, even the female 


PERIOD II. MOTHERS OF ISRAEL. 151 


captive was marked out for fostering and healing kindness, and 
allowed time for mourning, instead of, as in the case of other 
nations, aye, even those of later days who called themselves 
followers of Jesus, being hurried to the bed of the brutal 
conqueror, who was often still reeking with the blood of her 
relations. How then can it be said, that in every other religion 
save that of the Nazarene, woman’s station is degraded, even 
as the heathen and the slave ? 

With a mighty arm the Lord had brought forth Israel from 
the land of bondage, enriched by the spoil, which they did not 
borrow from the Egyptians, as the usual translation renders it, 
bnt had demanded , as their right from weary years of unpaid 
labor, and which, terrified at the awful plagues which had be- 
fallen them, was granted them at once. “ The Lord gave the people 
favor in the sight of the Egyptians,” are words twice repeated, 
thus doing away at once all idea of the Eternal having favored 
fraud, even against His enemies and the enemies of His people. 
They demanded the long arrears of payment, and they were 
given, in jewels of silver, and jewels of gold ; and so, not by 
deceit, but in justice, they, to use the Bible language, “ spoiled 
the Egyptians.” 

The powers of Nature herself succumbed before the mighty 
will of her Creator. Fire, earth, air, and water, had departed 
from what is called their natural course, to bring forth Israel 
from bondage, and to falsify at once the awful denial of a God, 
in the vain dream of necessity and nature. The sea itself — as 
the final seal to the stupendous manifestations of Almighty 
Power displayed in the ten plagues — divided at the word of its 
Creator, and the host of Israel — men, women, and little children 
— passed through on dry land, with a watery wall, seeming to 
unite earth to heaven, on either side. And when the unbe 
lieving scoffers followed — when, denying still the sanctity ol 
Israel, the wonders of Israel’s God, the chariots and hosts 
of Pharaoh dashed on in vain defiance of the Lord — down tum- 
bled the overwhelming mass of mighty waters, and the proud 
hosts of Pharaoh lay dead before their slaves. And when the 
song of thanksgiving, of adoration, rose from the hearts and lips 
of the redeemed, the vc?ce not only of man but of woman pro- 
*onr>*ed the strain. “ And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of 
Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand ; and all the women went 
after her with timbrels and with dances. And Miriam answered 


1 52 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


them, Sing ye to the Lord ! for He hath triumphed gloriously, 
The horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea.” 

Woman is not gifted with a silvery voice and an ear for har- 
mony, to devote to the pleasure of man alone. Let her devote 
them sometimes to the praises of the Lord, and bid the psalm 
of thanksgiving filling the sanctuary of the Lord be answered from 
her lips ; and the sweet sanctuary of home, at morning and 
evening prayer, behold her leading infant lips to tune their first 
song in thanksgiving to their Father and their God. 

As a general view of the beautiful laws constituting the Mo- 
saic religion does not enter into the plan of this work, we shall 
throw together those portions on which, as they regard woman, 
we shall somewhat lengthily treat, without any reference to their 
probable dates. We know that all the laws forming our religion 
were given between their departure from Egypt and arrival in 
the promised land, and are contained principally in chapters 19, 
20, 21, 22, 23, and 29 of Exodus — in the whole book of Levi- 
ticus — in chapters 5, 6, 8, 9, 15, 16, 17, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35, and 
36 of Numbers — and in the whole book of Deuteronomy. From 
these we select and examine all that can give weight to, and 
throw light upon, the six divisions of our present subject. 

As the first and most beautiful relationship in which 
woman is undeniably necessary to man — the object of his first 
affections, to whom he owes all of cherishing, happiness, and 
health, from infancy to boyhood, and often from boyhood to 
youth ; and who, in consequence, must be entwined with every 
fold remembrance of childhood, the recollection of which is often 
the only soother, the only light, in the darker heart of man — 
it is but just that we should examine, first, how the holy rela- 
tionship of a Mother in Israel is guarded and noticed by our 
law. 

The very first command relative to the duties of man towards 
man, marks out the position of children with regard to their 
parents, male and female , the representatives of God on earth. 
It was not enough that such position should be left to the natu- 
ral impulses of gratitude and affection — not enough that the love 
and reverence of a child to his parent should be left to his own 
heart, although in the cases of both Isaac and Jacob such had 
been so distinctly manifested. No ; the same tremendous voice 
which bade the very earth quake, and the fast rooted mountain 
reel — which spoke in the midst of thunders and lightnings, 


PERIOD II. MOTHERS OF ISRAEL. 153 


* Thou slialt have no other gods but me,” — also said, “ Honoi 
thy father and thy Mother,” and added unto its obedience a 
promise of reward, the only command to which recompense is 
annexed, that its obedience might indeed be an obedience of 
love. And lest there should be some natures so stubborn and 
obtuse that the fear of punishment only could affect, we read in 
the repetition, and, as it were, enlargement on the ten com- 
mandments, “ And he that smiteth his father or his mother 
shall surely be put to death, and he that curseth or revileth his 
father or his mother shall surely be put to death ” (Exodus 
xxi. 15 — lV). “Ye shall fear every man his mother and 
his hither, and keep my sabbaths ; I am the Lord ” (Levit xix. 
3). “ For every one that curseth his father or his mother, shall 

surely be put to death. He that cursed his father or his mother, 
his blood shall be upon him.” And again, in Deuteronomy v. 16, 
we have the repetition of the fifth commandment, the reward 
attending its obedience still more vividly enforced : “Honor 
thy father and thy mother, as the Lord thy God hath com- 
manded thee, that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may 
go well with thee in the land which the Lord thy God givetli 
thee.” 

With laws like these, bearing on every one of them the 
stamp of divine truth, of a sacred solemnity which could come 
from God alone, how can any one believe in, much less assert, 
the Jewish degradation of woman, or call that Judaism which 
upholds it ! 

IIow could these solemn and often reiterated commands be 
obeyed, if tire son of Israel beheld his mother merely the igno- 
rant bond-slave of his father ? How could he honor her ? What 
could have such influence upon his moments of passion as to 
restrain him, when so tempted, from smiting, reviling, or cursing 
her ? How could he fear her, when he beheld her trembling 
before his father, not as her husband, but as her master ? But 
such he saw not. Weaker in frame, from her position and her 
duties ; less mighty in mental powers, yet possessing every attri- 
bute to make home blessed, and her children holy followers of 
God, virtuous and patriotic citizens of their land ; shrined in his 
heart with every memory of his infancy ; — such was the Hebrew 
mother to her son. Were the laws obeyed, there could be no 
neglectful or sinning mother. Not even suspicion could attack 
her. The law guarded her even from her own relatives, if they 


154 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


falsely wronged her* compelled her, even under the fear of deatl^ 
to be chaste, holy, virtuous, and faithful in every duty of domestic 
and public life ; and, therefore, it was a labor of love for her 
children to obey their God in honoring her, and a crime worthy 
of death, if indeed there could be found any sufficiently hardened 
ana rebellious as to disobey. 

Again, we find in Deut. xxi. 18, “ If a man have a stubborn 
and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father or 
the voice of his mother, and who, when they have chastened 
him, will not hearken unto them, then shall his father and his 
mother lay hold of him, and bring him to the elders of the city, 
and unto the gate of his place. And they shall say unto the 
elders of the city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious ; he 
will not obey our voice. And all the men of his city shall stone 
him with stones that he die. So shalt thou put away evil from 
among you, that all Israel shall hear and fear.” 

We here find at length a practical commentary or example, 
as it were, of the briefer laws on the same subject, given pre- 
viousty. To modern ears, and present notions of false refine- 
ment, such commands seem unnaturally harsh and terrible. In 
those times, they must have been needed, or they would not 
have been given. And beautifully, even in their harshness, do 
they demonstrate the reverential duty of Israelitish children to 
their parents. Still more powerfully do they illustrate the per 
feet equality of father and mother in respect to their children. 
It was not only that disobedience to the latter was equally 
punishable as to the former, but that the voice of the mother 
was also to condemn her son, or he could not be proved guilty ; 
a peculiarly just law in a nation where more than one wife was 
allowed. Without it, how often might the more favored work 
upon the husband to believe false tales of the offspring of her 
rival ! How often might innocence have been condemned, in- 
justice and cruelty permitted, in a man’s own household ! Evils 
effectually prevented by the father’s witness being unavailable 
without that of the accused’s own mother — one, we must feel, 
not at all likely to come forward against her own child, unless 
his crimes had been so heinous as to prevent the possibility of 
her shielding him any longer. We have no recorded instance 
of such a fearful evil in Israel ; but the severe law given in case 
of such, should never be forgotten by us, marking, as it does, 


PERIOD II. MOTHERS OF ISRAEL. 155 

the wrath and justice of the Lord against all those of His chosen 
people who could forget, neglect, or wilfully abuse, in any one 
point, their duty to their earthly parents. 

Although mothers are not individually commanded to instruct 
their children in the knowledge of God and His Law, they are 
certainly joined with the fathers in the performance of that 
sacred duty. Every statute, every ordinance, given by the Lord 
to Moses, was always introduced by the command, “ Speak ye 
to the Children of Israel “ Say ye to the children of Israel 
or, “ Hear, O Israel words including tl]e whole congregation, 
male and female. Had man only been included, Moses would 
have addressed them as sons, or as fathers of tribes, as we find 
Aaron and his sons, and the priests or Levites, in some few in- 
stances particularly specified. That woman is intimately joined 
with man in the religious instruction of her children, is also 
proved by the fact that the mothers of the kings of Israel and 
Judah are always mentioned by name, as if to them, yet more 
than to their fathers, they owed their early impressions of good 
or evil which their after lives displayed. The very commands 
regarding parents are strong confirmation. A son could not 
honor, and fear, and love his mother, if he only owed her his 
first nourishment, and received nothing at her hand but the 
same instinctive care as the brute creation display towards their 
young. The immortal mind and soul of man must have some- 
thing more to reverence and fear, even if the natural links bind- 
ing mother and son were sufficient (which we much doubt) to 
call for love. In commanding reverence and obedience from 
children, God knew that He had so gifted the Hebrew mother, 
and so marked her duties and position, as to render such emo- 
tions merely her due. To her, then, as well as to the father, 
are those important injunctions contained in Deut. vi. 20 — 25, 
emphatically addressed ; and according to the measure of her 
obedience to them, so will be the measure of her children’s reve- 
rence and love. 

The same chapter, but a few verses previous, had solemnly 
commanded Israel to love the Lord his God with heart, and 
60 ul, and might — to lay his words upon his own heart, and 
teach them diligently to his children. And, after demanding 
obedience and righteousness in other statutes, proceeds : “ And 

when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What mean 
these testimonies, and statutes, and judgments which the Lord 


156 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


our God bath commanded you ? Then thou slialt say unto thy 
son, We were Pharaoh’s bondmen in Egypt, and the Lord 
brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand ; and the Lord 
showed signs and wonders, great and sore, upon Egypt, upon 
Pharaoh, and upon all his household before our eyes ; and lie 
brought us out from thence that he might bring us in, to give 
us the land which He sware unto our fathers. And the Lord 
commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the Lord our 
God, for our good always, that He might preserve us alive, as it 
is at this day. And it is our righteousness if we observe to do 
all these commandments before the Lord our God, as He hath 
commanded us. 

On the weighty all , which to Hebrew parents is comprised in 
these emphatic verses, we must not at present linger, save to ob- 
?erve, that much as was required from parents, when the law 
was given, and in Jerusalem, still more is needed now. We 
have to add to the history of our bondage and redemption, that 
of our glory and our sins — of our first captivity and our partial 
restoration — our renewed and increased iniquities — of the long 
suffering, long forbearance of an infinitely merciful God — of His 
averted, yet at length falling wrath — of our exile, our persecu- 
tion, and misery — all which Moses himself foretold ; and yet 
our never-dying hope, our incentive for constancy, even through 
the flames of martyrdom, or the more lingering martyrdom of a 
crushed spirit and broken heart; the imperative necessity of a 
return unto the Lord through humility and righteousness, trust- 
ing in Him to purify and save. 

All this must now be added to the parental instruction 
enforced by Moses : and all this is equally demanded from the 
mother as from the father, would they receive to its full extent 
the reverence ordained by God Himself. For not by precept 
alone must this instruction be given. The young spirit must 
be led by example as well as exhortation. Let him see that 
the instructions of his parents come from the heart as well as 
lips — influence their thoughts, words, and actions — nay, their 
very being — and never need they despair. However long it 
may be before the fruit they have sown appear, it will spring 
into beautiful maturity at last, and shed its purest fragrance in 
that hour when the faithful mother watches the rapid approach 
of that last struggle which shall wing her spirit tr the footstool 
of her God. 


PERIOD II. MOTHERS OF ISRAEL. 155 

Will, then, the Hebrew mother rest content with the station 
assigned her by the ignorant and the prejudiced, and not strain 
every nerve, rouse every energy, to make the command of the 
Eternal for her children to honor and fear her, easy, and joyous 
to obey ? 

She has done, and she does this ! Not a slur, not a stigma, 
not a shadow can be flung upon the conduct of Hebrew mothers 
to their offspring. N eglect, injustice, partiality, want of affec- 
tion, harshness, coldness flung by fashion between mother and 
child, that littleness and jealousy which would keep back youth- 
ful loveliness for a longer individual reign, — such things may be 
known — may be common — among other nations, but to the 
Hebrew they are utterly unknown. It is easy to assert that the 
woman of Israel is degraded and a slave ; but did such false 
accusers visit a domestic circle — did they but see a Hebrew 
mother and her children — they would find it difficult to prove 
it. Then let every son of Israel receive such religious training 
from his mother, in addition, or rather closely twined, to the 
moral and intellectual education she has so long given, that he 
may be ready, from his very boyhood, indignantly to repudiate 
the charge, and prove, by his whole conduct — alike in public 
career, as well as his domestic reverence and love — that his 
mother is as free in the sight of man, as responsible in the sight 
of God, and as much the possessor of an immortal spirit as his 
father and himself. 

To the Mosaic religion, then, and to no other, does not only 
Israel, but every other nation by whom the Bible is acknow- 
ledged divine, owe the elevation, the dignity, the holiness of 
woman as a mother, a position marked out by God Himself, 
and proclaimed and held sacred, not only by the awful threat of 
punishment, but by the solemn promise of divine reward. How 
sacred then to every son and daughter of Israel must be their 
duty to their parents ! Disobedience, neglect, scorn, are no 
longer capital offences according to the justice of man ; but, 
oh ! let us not for one moment forget, that the same God who 
commanded that such they should be, is watching over Israel 
still, will demand from every child if His command has been 
obeyed— from every parent if they have done their duty, and 
taught their children from earliest years, that disobedience to 
them is disobedience to *.\eir God , and in His eyes , and in His 
law, a capital offence . Were this truth more constantly, more 


158 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


impressively enforced, the reciprocal duties of parent and child 
would be more easily and more happily fulfilled , and the heart- 
burnings, the anguish, occasioned to parents by neglect and 
nnkindness, and the rebellion and constant struggles of their 
offspring to fling off an authority which has never been exerted 
in infancy, and so must gall in youth, alike be at an end, and 
Israel’s homes, as well as Israel’s law, proclaim the guiding spirit 
and loving mercy of the Lord. 


CHAPTER III 

LAWS FOR THE WIVES OF ISRAEL 

The laws instituted for the protection, the position, the duties, 
of the wives of Israel, were more peculiar to the manners and 
customs of the East only, than those relative to mothers, which 
can be obeyed and attended to in every age and clime. Still 
much was instituted, even with regard to wives, which marked 
and fixed their position, and decidedly elevated woman in the 
scale of being, and proved that, though, as was just and wise, 
“ her desires must bow to her husband, and he should rule ovei 
her,” yet that this rule was to be one of perfect confidence 
and love. 

It has always appeared a mystery, how any person, even 
among the Gentiles, who has seriously reflected on, and studied 
the word of God, can assert that it was only through the 
preaching of Jesus and his apostles that woman took her proper 
station, and those ordinances were given, which restrained the 
passions of men, and made marriage a pure and holy tie. 
Centuries before the advent of Christianity, those laws we-e 
given, which, regarding and prohibiting too near consanguinity 
in marriage, are acknowledged and obeyed by the whole civi- 
lized world. Where do we find, amid the Gentile nations, the 
purity, the chastity, the stainless virtue of woman, to the extent 


r JRIOD 


I. WIVES OF ISRAEL. 150 


which is still the glory of Israel, and which owes its origin 
simply to the laws which were issued by the Lord through 
Moses ; seeming, indeed, most terribly severe, but blessed in 
their very severity by the beautiful purity in Israel which they 
wrought? Were the law of Moses universally received, how 
different would be the aspect of the world ! 

Polygamy was permitted in Israel, at the period of the deli- 
very of the law, simply because the Eternal’s mercy would not 
interfere with an immemorial usage, which his wisdom knew, 
from local customs and long-indulged habit, would demand 
violence to be relinquished. The laws He instituted in no way 
interfered with those habits of His people which custom had 
endeared ; His prescience leaving to time that improvement and 
greater refinement of the human race, which demands ages to 
accomplish, but which would at length fling aside of itself every 
fetter that once had linked it to the customs of less enlightened 
nations. The Eternal never works by superhuman agency, 
when His gracious plans can be accomplished without it. “ A 
thousand years in His sight are but as yesterday when passed, 
and as a watch in the night but His infinite wisdom knew, 
that, to finite man, that period is ever fraught with progression, 
and His omniscience leaves to time, according to the reckoning 
of humanity, the effect of His law in the amelioration and im- 
provement of the human race. Our very banishment amid the 
nations, a banishment occasioned by Israel’s sinful abuse of the 
tender mercies of the Lord — by his retrogression instead of ad- 
vancement, in the glorious career to which he was destined — by 
his indulgence of every guilty passion, and utter forgetfulness of 
his fathers’ God to bow down before the idols of his idolatrous 
wives — this very banishment will purify Israel from the grosser 
part of his Eastern nature, and render him fitted, by increase of 
purity and refinement, to become once more the first born of 
the Lord, from whose beautiful land those laws shall issue once 
again, to emanate in reviving light and gladness over the whole 
world. 

But, though permitted by the Mosaic law, polygamy was so 
restricted, that the protection, happiness, and well-doing of both 
wives were provided for ; no partiality could permit injustice ; 
the man that did so was punishable by law. “ If a man have 
two wives, the one beloved and the other hated, and they have 
borne him children, both the beloved and the hated, and if the 


160 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


first-born son be hers that is hated, then it shall be, when In 
maketh his sons to inherit all that he hath, that he may no 
make the son of the beloved first born before the son of the 
hated, which is indeed the first born, but he shall acknowledge 
the son of the hated for the first born, by giving him a double 
portion of all that he hath.” 

The Hebrew term translated hated here, as in the case of 
Leah, does not signify so strong a feeling, but simply the one 
less beloved than the other. And, as had already been practi- 
cally illustrated in the wives of the Patriarch Jacob, this law 
provides for, and fixes the perfect equality of both ; guarding 
the less beloved from all the evil effects of indiscriminate par- 
tiality, and utterly preventing the father from doing injustice to 
her offspring. The care taken of every member of a Jewish 
family — from the strongest to the weakest — by the law of God, 
would, had that law been obeyed, have effectually prevented 
that fearful abuse of the Lord’s mercy in not interfering with 
the ancient customs of His people, which in the time of the 
monarchy so disgraced and desecrated Israel. But let not the 
scoffer cast the odium of such abuse on the Jewish Law. That 
law was pure — infused with the love, the compassion, the fos- 
tering care, the justice, and the severity of the God from whom 
it came. Its obedience would have wrought “the days of 
heaven upon the earth.” Its disobedience, springing from the 
innate sinfulness of man, wrought evil from the good, and 
plunged the whole nation of Israel into that fearful abyss of 
crime, which could only be expiated by ages of misery and 
blood. 

But though allowed to exist without being considered a crime 
at the period of the redemption from Egypt, for the reasons 
6tated above, the laws of Moses, relating to conjugal duties, pro- 
vided for one wife alone, thus proving the superior and holier 
purity of such unions in the sight of God, and thus forcibly 
marking the distinction between those customs which were to 
last for ever, through every age, and race, and clime, and those 
which were merely nationalized from previous habit and asso- 
riation. 

The oneness of heart and feeling, of purpose and obedience, 
*hich was ordained by God Himself, from the very beginning, 
to exist between husoand and wife, and which could only spring 
from perfect equality is most beautifully infused throughout the 


PERIOD II. WIVES OF ISRAEL. 


lt)l 


aw. Inferred from the simple fact, that in every recorded 
instance of enumeration at festivals, eating of holy meats, obedi- 
ence to commandments, &c., the wife is not distinctly men- 
tioned, although every other domestic relation is expressly 
stated. As one with her husband, the wife was included in the 
emphatic thou , to whom the command or ordinance was ad- 
dressed. The children and servants of a household might have 
rebel liously turned aside from the precepts of the Lord, but the 
wife’s duty and happiness were one with her husband’s. Her 
will was his, when that will was guided and sanctified by the 
will of God. That she could require the divine command indi- 
vidually to keep holy the Sabbath day, to share the feast of the 
offerings, <fcc., was a supposition too utterly at variance with her 
duty as a daughter and wife in Israel, to demand a distinct law ; 
being counted amongst those to whom Moses proclaimed, “When 
all Israel is come to appear before the Lord thy God, in the 
place which He shall choose, thou shalt read this law before all 
Israel in their hearing ; Gather the people together, men. 
women, and children, and the stranger that is within thy gates, 
that they may hear, and that they may learn, and fear the Lord 
your God, and observe to do all the words of this law,” no He- 
brew wife could have needed more, for she, as well as her 
husband — one with him — was the recipient, the obeyer, and the 
promulgator of every law in which there was no specified dis 
tinction of individual duties. 

That the omission of wife in the commandments and ordi- 
nances which specify other members of the family, cannot be 
taken in any other light, is proved by the fact, that wherever 
there was a possibility of her occupying a distinct position, or 
being engaged in anj devices or employments contrary to tho 
will of her husband, she is expressly named. 

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife ,” is emphatically 
commanded by the same Divine Voice which omitted her, or 
rather included her in the “ thou ” to whom the fourth of the 
same precepts, whence the line we have quoted was the tenth, 
was given. Thus guarding her safety, and prohibiting the very 
first thought towards her which could have led to sin. 

Again, “if thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, 
or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or the friend whom 
thou lovest as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, ‘Let 
us go and serve other gods, whom thou hast not known, thou 


162 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


nor thy fathers,’ <fec., thou shalt not consent unto him, not 
hearken unto him ; neither shall thine eye pity, neither shalt tho\l 
spare, neither shalt thou conceal him.” Here, in intimate conjunc- 
tion with the preceding commandment, is a positive mention of 
the wife, supposing her to be actuated by feelings and principles 
so distinct from her husband, as to tempt him to sin. The 
omission of wives in ordinances where every other member of 
the household is named, is not then in any way whatever to 
suppose her a nonentity, a mere name in Israel, but simply to 
mark her oneness with her husband, in every duty to her God, 
and in every command and restriction of His law addressed 
to the children of Israel, and, therefore, binding on them 

BOTH. 

“ When a man has taken a wife, ho shall not go out to 
war; neither shall he be charged with any business, but he 
shall be free at home for one year.” Were this the whole law, 
we might justly suppose that the happiness of man was alone 
regarded; but it is not so. Why was this year of release 
granted him ? For his own enjoyment ? his own pleasure ? 
No ! but to “ cheer up ” — or, in other words, to make happy 
— the wife which he had taken. Words how exquisitely 
descriptive of the Eternal’s tender sympathy in the earthly 
happiness of his children ! He condescended to enter into the 
minute details of domestic life ; He guarded even their earthly 
happiness from all contingencies, and proved that he demanded 
not His love to be realized only in sorrow, but that joy, chas- 
tened, spiritualized by gratitude and love, was equally- acceptable 
and blessed. 

Man might find happiness apart from his wife, even in the 
first year of his marriage. The exciting call of war, or the grosser 
and more engrossing claims of business, might easily obtain 
such dominion as to render him less careful of his home, less 
anxious for the happiness of his wife, than were he free. 
Woman has no such claims to share her heart with her hus- 
band. Almost more than any other time in her young exist- 
ence does she need the protecting care and fostering tenderness 
of man, in the first year of her wedded life. She has left the 
home of her youth, the fond parents who had lavished on her 
such love and care, that it seems strange how she can possibly 
exist without them. She has turned from her occupations, the 
tmusements of her early years, dear from long association, hi 


PERIOD II. WIVES OP ISRAEL. 


163 


enier into an entirely new scene, new feelings, new duties, new 
responsibilities : and for guidance and support, under her God, 
looks with justice to her husband alone. She may be called 
upon to battle with sickness and with pain, and she has no 
longer a mother beside her to give her the fond cares of a ten- 
der nurse, and take from her all household duties. She has 
turned from all for the love of One ! And how may she be 
happy if that one be torn from her by the call to war, perhaps 
never to return, or by civil duties, which, though the lesser evil, 
might yet check the daily intercourse of mutual love and con- 
fidence for which she pines ? 

But, left “ free for one year,” how much of felicity, not only for the 
present, but the future, would that single ordinance bring to both. 
And must not we, the lineal descendants of those to whom such 
a revelation of God’s love was given, feel, to our heart’s core, 
that God is indeed the God of love which he proclaimed Him- 
self to Moses ? Surely no woman of Israel can fear to approach 
Him, deeming Him a being too awfully holy to look on such as 
her, when that unapproachable holiness is veiled by such a flood 
of irradiating love towards her individually, that she is more 
than weak, is guilty, if she keep aloof, and refuse, under the mis- 
taken plea of too great unworthiness, to clasp the mercy proffered, 
and fold its healing balsam to her heart. God would not bid us 
love Him, if we were too unworthy so to do. He would not in 
His every law, His every promise, demonstrate His compassion- 
ating care, His appealing love, His long-suffering mercy, did He 
deem us too unworthy to receive them. Can the flower that 
gems the grass give back the loving care that there hath placed, 
guards, and will renew it ? Can the bird give back the foster- 
ing love which guards its fragile form, teaches the construction 
of its tiny nest, and guards its helpless young ? Can the insect 
know and return the Father’s love that guards its gossamer life, 
blesses it with acute sensation, and endows it with such wisdom 
in the construction of its web, nest, or cell, as to excite man’s 
envy ? Yet, has not the Eternal care for these ? and will not 
therefore all Nature confirm His* precious word, and tell us lie 
has equal care and equal love for us ? True, we have sinned — 
we do sin — and, alas"! will sin again, till that blessed day when 
the “ stony heart shall be replaced with a heart of flesh,” which 
will, unsullied by mortal frailties, cleave unto the Lord. Yel 
God has given us power to struggle with and resist the evil, if 


164 


THE WOMEN OP ISRAEL. 


we cam.ot in this world wholly conquer it. He has told 
that w His ways are not our ways,” and, therefore, however 
incomprehensible to finite man, “ in Him shall the Seed of 
Israel be justified, and shall glory.” He has taught us in 
infinite compassion, what we must do, and how feel, to be 
acceptable in His sight ; not in the law alone, for if we study 
only that in our captivity, we shall be appalled by tli6 ordinan- 
ces we cannot now perform, but in His prophets and the Psdms, 
which, as rules of conduct and of feeling, will give us all we 
need. 

As a statute of the Israelitish state, the law we have been 
considering is no longer obeyed ; it cannot be, for we are not 
now in our own land ; but it is the spirit of the ordinance which 
so nearly concerns us, more especially as women. 

T o recognise to its full extent the distinction between the ways 
of God and the ways of man, so beautifully displayed in this our 
law, let us think one moment on the policy actuating leaders and 
lawgivers of more modern times, men professing to be guided 
by the spirit of love and peace. Where, in feudal times, do we 
find provision thus made for the newly-wedded ? A stigma, 
never to be blotted out, would have clung round the name and 
reputation of that man who would not turn from his home and 
young wife, even on his marriage day, at the first rude call to 
lawless, and often most unnecessary war. Where do we find 
lawgivers, princes, and nobles, ever taking into consideration the 
comfort and peace, we will not even say happiness, of then 
female followers ? Where were laws ever issued for her, to 
guard with fostering tenderness her gentle virtues, her clinging 
affections, her domestic charms ? Where, save in the law of God ? 
To attract attention, to win respect, to obtain protection, she was 
compelled to be more great than good , to leave her natural sphere, 
and manifest fortitude, bravery, and devotedness, qualities indeed 
excellent in themselves, but, as proved in the middle ages, only 
valued for their near relation to the qualities of the warrior, and 
departure from woman’s ordinary habits and home. And by 
what thousands of suffering women, of all ages, must, these cha- 
racteristics have been unattainable, and in consequence how 
many thousands left to all the misery of deserted homes, crushed 
affections, and the countless nameless tortures borne by woman 
in a lonely unprotected path ? And much later than the feudal 
times, a period but very little removed into the past, — shall we 


PERIOD II. WIVES OF ISRAEL. 165 

Bay tlie horrible conscription which devastated France, and every 
conquered territory owning Buonaparte as master, manifested that 
care of woman, that tender sympathy in her every feeling, which 
we are told is only found with the believers in the gospel ? We 
must judge of the divinity of laws by the spirit which, from their 
observance, emanates over those to whom they are binding 
The Jewish law is, on many points, during our captivity, impos- 
sible to be observed. Yet we see the spirit of its ancient ordi- 
nances still guiding our homesteads, impelling the gentlest and 
most confiding spirit towards woman in every relation of life. 
The Hebrew may scarcely be conscious what actuates his tender- 
ness towards his wife and children, but it comes from the spirit 
of that law, given to his fathers, in which woman was marked 
as the especial care and protection of the Lord. The law, in form, 
like ihe human frame, may die for a time, but the spirit of the 
ordinances, like the soul of the body, is immortal, and will revive 
again the shell from which awhile it may have flown. 

The law of Vows is considered by some derogatory to the dig- 
nity of woman, by rendering her liable to the will of her husband, 
and subject to his approval, even in her devoting herself to her 
God. We will endeavor to prove that the supposition is mis- 
taken. Equally acceptable and responsible as man in the sight 
of God, still, as we have said before, “ her desires were to bow to 
her husband.” She neglected her conjugal duty if she pursued 
any course, even under the pretence of religious motives, con- 
trary to his will. A singular vow demanded a voluntary 
relinquishment of domestic duties and enjoyments, to devote 
herself in some way to His service ; it is generally supposed in 
some employments of the Tabernacle, or in the service of His 
poor, or in the “ binding oath to afflict the soul,” giving herself 
up for a certain time to individual fast and prayer. Now few 
women in Israel, except orphaned single women, and childless 
widow's, could be so independently situated as to make and fol- 
low up these vows without interfering with some nearer domes- 
tic duty. Woman’s sphere in the law of God, without doubt, 
is home ; her noblest attraction, devotedness to those with whom 
she is there thrown in daily intercourse. Some women there 
are, who find not only duty, but pleasure there — not only love, 
but safety. Others again, restless and discontented, fancy they 
should be happier, and better, and more useful, anywhere but 
where they are, and gladly seize the first pretence to turn aside. 


166 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


Spiritual devoted ness is too often a worldly snare, and th< 
pride of holiness the most dangerous temptation which can 
possibly assail us. We have often heard (amongst the Gen- 
tiles indeed, not amongst ourselves, for we have unhappily too 
few enthusiasts of any kind) Df what is termed a saint (we abhor 
the falsity of the term, but we are using now the language of 
the world). One avowedly devoted to the cause of religion ; 
passing hours in her closet, surrounded by religious books, all, 
we may observe, commentaries , but not the Word of Life 
itself ; or, with religious friends, wearing a peculiar dress, and 
most peculiar manners ; visiting the poor, more often with tracts 
than food ; censuring every innocent amusement as profane, and 
temptations of Satan ; bearing words of humility on the lips, 
but of pride in heart ; outwardly condemning and abhorring 
her own sins, but inwardly thanking God that she is so much 
holier than others ; robing religion in such dark and terrible 
colors, that the young spirit shrinks from it, and plunges in the 
world with renewed zest, to escape from the faintest semblance 
of its acceptance. 

If there be such, mistaken they certainly are ; but their 
judgment rests with Him whom they seek after their own 
thoughts to serve, not with their brother man, who, without 
sonr.e more true and sacred guide, might equally be led astray. 
Wb have merely alluded to this class of religious enthusiast's, 
more clearly to manifest the evil which the law of vows effectu- 
ally excluded, but which, without such law, might, from the 
holiness pervading God’s people, have been more than likely to 
ensue. 

Man did not need such restraint upon his “ singular vows 
because, in the first place, he was more independent than 
woman ; in the next, reason , not feeling, being his guide, he 
was not likely to fall into the temptation of ill-regulated enthusi- 
asm, even in his holiest and dearest duty. Woman’s guide in 
general is feeling: she is a creature of impulse, ever likely, 
unless strongly yet tenderly restrained, to turn aside from the 
safer and less excitable path of daily duty, wherever the affec- 
tions or the enthusiasm of the moment may lead. Moro 
especially is she likely to fall into this temptation when firsi 
awakened to the claims, and beauty, and comfort of religion. 
The simple duties of home then seem little worth, compared to 
the service of heaven. Ilerself, her parents and brothers, h as- 


PERIOD II. W IVES OF ISRAEL. 


167 


band and children, appear of slender consequence compared ta 
the state of her affections and faith towards God. The perfect 
compatibility of her duties towards God and towards man is 
unperceived. She cannot realize that the unfatiguing, unex- 
citing duties of domestic usefulness, infused with thoughts of 
God and of His word, is the path most acceptable to Him ; 
and severing, instead of uniting, she neglects what she deems 
the lesser, to pursue the greater duty. 

Many avenues were open to the wives of Israel to tempt the 
taking “ singular vows.” The birth of children, the recovery 
from illness, escape from danger, receipt of some unexpected 
blessing, dread of impending sorrow, or misfortune extraordi- 
narily averted, and sin repented of, all these might, in the close 
links which, when the law was given, bound Israel to the Lord, 
and in the warm passionate emotions of Eastern women, have 
impelled either the vow of service, to make manifest their 
thanksgiving, or the vow of affliction by fasting and prayer, to 
propitiate the Lord and turn away His wrath. And this vow 
might be taken in a moment of strong feeling, without sufficient 
thought as to the possibility of its performance, without inter- 
fering with the comforts of her husband and children, or her 
duties to her household. Was it not, then, just and wise, that 
the impetuous feeling of woman should be guided and tenderly 
restrained by the calmer, stronger reason and foresight of man ? 

But that this dependence on her husband in no way subjected 
her to his caprice, is proved by the law which we will extract 
at length. “ If a woman shall vow a vow unto the Lord, and 
bind herself by a bond And if she had at all a hus- 

band when she vowed or uttered aught out of her lips wherewith 
she bound her soul ; and her husband heard it, and held his 
peace at her in the day that he heard it, then her vows shall 
stand, and her bonds wherewith she bound her soul shall stand. 
But if her husband disallowed her on the day that he heard, 
then he shall make her vows which she vowed, and that which 
she uttered with her lips, wherewith she bound her soul, of none 

effect, and the Lord shall forgive her Every vow, and 

every binding oath to afflict the soul, her husband may establish 
it, or her husband may make it void. Bui if her husband hold 
his peace at her from day to day, then he established all her 
vows, or all her bonds which are upon her. He confirmed 
them , because he held his peace at her in the day that he heard 


168 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


them. And if he shall any ways make them void , after that hi 
hath heard them , then he shall bear her iniquity.” (Nuim 
bers xxx. 3, 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15.) 

We here find most particular care taken to shield woman from 
tiiat indecision and caprice from which she is so often the 
innocent sufferer. 

The honor, respect, and deference which should characterize 
a wife’s conduct and feelings towards her husband, are first 
enforced. For the unperformed vow, or the breaking the vows 
of the lips, the Lord will forgive her, because they have been 
disallowed by her husband. But they must be disallowed when 
taken. If from indecision, or weakness, or unkindness, in the 
determination to thwart the wishes of his wife, he neither forbids 
nor confirms, but remains silent, that silence, in the sight of 
God and to his wife, is confirmation. He has no power 
capriciously to prevent the fulSlment of her bond or vow by 
declaring that silence is not consent, and he does not choose 
that her vow shall be performed. He cannot do this. His very 
caprice is effectually prevented, for, if he acts thus, the woman’s 
breach of vows will indeed be forgiven to her, but he shall 
bear its iniquity, — a law whose beautiful justice marks its 
divine origin more forcibly than almost any other guiding the 
conduct of husband and wife. 

No human legislator could have enacted it, for what lawgiver 
of earth could have gone so deeply into the very heart of man, 
arid guarded the domestic relations of life from such petty yet 
constant misery as caprice ? 

One most consoling truth we learn by this law : it is in itself 
a direct and positive refutation of the charge brought against 
us, that Jewish women have no access to God — no right what- 
ever to interfere with the requirements and ordinances of 
religion. Were woman the creature of a day, passing hence to 
be no more, with neither hope of reward nor liability to wrath, 
beyond this world, why should she have the power of making 
vows at all ; and so solemnly, that did man interfere with their 
due performance, he should bear her iniquity, and woman — aye, 
the despised and degraded woman — should be forgiven ? 

The candid and unprejudiced reader of the word of life, be 
liis faith what it may, must perceive how mistaken is such a 
charge ; and let not, then, our young sisters be tempted to quit 
Uieir native fold for another, where they are told greater privi 


PERIOD II. WIVES OF ISRAEL. 100 

feges await them, both as women and as immortal beings. Let 
them not be terrified by the charge that, as Jewish women, they 
are soulless slaves. But let them come to the word of God, 
and prove that there is their shield, there is their defence. That 
there their God Himself has revealed a love and care for His 
weaker children, too deeply, too nearly, too blessedly for them 
to need aught else ; that there is their hope, as there is their 
consolation. 

Yet more to protect bis feebler creation from the fierce passions 
and unjust accusations of Eastern natures, the Most High, in his 
infinite mercy, instituted the law of jealousy, an awful and most 
terrible law, yet one which every innocent woman must have 
hailed with thankfulness, and which every guilty woman must 
have died ere she could have faced. The various sins prohibited 
by the voice of God Himself, in His Ten Commandments, are all 
in His sight of equal magnitude, and, therefore, without any 
reservation whatever, were all punishable with death. And 
well had it been for the purity, virtue, and happiness of man, 
had this blessed law continued in force as it was given, and 
thence had emanated over the whole world. It has been called 
a law of fire and blood, given but to destroy and be destroyed. 
But the charge is false. The Eternal knew the natures of those 
to whom it was given — that severity was needed for the time ; 
and had that severity been used, and the law literally and purely 
obeyed, even as it was intended, each generation would have 
been purer and more spiritual than the former, till that holiness 
was at length universally attained, which would indeed have 
brought “ the days of heaven on the earth and Israel would 
not now have been persecuted and tortured in some lands, and 
an exile and a wanderer, houseless and priestless, in them all ! 

Adultery, even as idolatry, sabbath-breaking, murder, &c., 
was punishable bv death. In Israel, the ruthless spoiler of man’s 
dearest shrine — his home, sacrificed not only his honor (which, 
however high sounding, to such characters must be but a name), 
not only his standing and his wealth, but his life. Aye, and 
not the tempter only, but the wife, the mother, who could fling 
misery upon a tortured husband, and undying shame upon her 
helpless babes. Yet amid a people irascible and fierce, too 
liable to jealousy to examine calmly and justly, as we know is 
the case at this very day with every Eastern nation, a law was 
imperatively needed to protect the helpless and innocent, alike 


170 


THE WO ME?' 


UF ISRAEL. 


from false charges and a husband’s unjust lmto. No man could 
take justice into his own hands. He dared not injure the 
reputation, or take the life of his wife, without having her guilt 
proved by God Himself. A false accusation had no power to 
fling shame upon her, or render her station doubtful, as it would 
now. The Most High Himself interfered in her defence, and 
proved, in the face of the whole people, her innocence and 
honor ; as, were she guilty, He took into His own hands her 
punishment, and the manifestation of her guilt 

The law of jealousy is not in general regarded by the women 
of Israel as it ought to be. False refinement shrinks from it as 
a thing perfectly unnecessary and antiquated now. Nay, perhaps 
as a law so horrible, so indelicate, that they wondei that it is 
not expunged from the Bible. By us it is welcomed as another 
most consoling and unanswerable proof of the Eternal’s tender 
mercy towards us. The full extent of its use and justice can 
only be realized by contrasting it with the statutes of the south- 
ern and eastern nations, with whose quick passions and excitability, 
Israel, when the law was given, had more in common than with 
the cooler and more dispassioned north. 

With the followers of Mahomet does not a mere thought, a 
mere suspicion, unaided by the very shadow of proofj commit 
the helpless woman to a watery grave, with none to interfere in 
her behalf, or mourn her when at rest? None to clear her 
name, or bring the false and cruel husband to justice and to 
shame ? And amidst those bearing the Christian name, do not 
th 3 Italian and Spaniard make as murderous use of the stiletto 
or the drugged cup, as the Moslem of the sack ? That such 
misery is seldom heard of in Protestant countries, comes not 
from actual law, but from that greater civilization and refinement, 
which must spring from public and private communion with the 
Bible. This is the safeguard of Protestant women, and this 
they owe to the spirit of that law given to us by God Himself. 
Some among the Gentiles there are, honest and spiritual enough 
to acknowledge this ; and from our very heart w r e honor such 
honest lovers of truth. But others, and unhappily the greater 
number, there are who fling shame and dishonor upon the 
women of the very people for whose safety those blessed laws 
were framed, the spirit of which is now guiding the Protestants 
themselves. 

By contrasting the law vouchsafed 5 us with those guiding 


PERIOD II. WIVES OF ISRAEL. 171 


the Gentiles of all denominations, we learn to know the true 
value of the blessed faith which we possess, and are armed 
against all insidious efforts to turn us from it. But this can never 
be whilst the women of Israel regard the laws of Moses only in 
a national and local, not in an individual view, believing that, 
because they are no longer in actual use, they only relate to 
them in their several positions in Jerusalem, and do not in the 
least concern them now. 

They do concern us, most nearly and most consolingly. He 
whose infinite mercy gave them has not cast us from His love, 
though, for a time, compelled for our sins to bear witness to the 
nations of His justice and His wrath. Yet for us, as a people, 
and each of us individually, He bears the same infinite long- 
suffering love which he bore to our ancestors in Egypt. We 
learn this from every prophet, who never spoke of sin without 
holding forth forgiveness, who never prophesied dispersion and 
banishment without comforting with the promise of restoration ; 
and we know the extent of our Father’s Love towards us, by 
every statute of His law. 

The interference of the Most High in cases similar to those 
calling for the law of jealousy, the wives of Israel may no longer 
need : but are there none in minor circumstances wrongfully 
accused ? None needing a Father who knoweth every secret 
thought and inward struggle, to whom to look when man may 
wilfully wrong, or blindly misappreciate ? None who struggle 
311 in the petty, but how sadly wearing, trials of daily life, to do 
A'hat seems the best, to act the kindest, to banish every throb 
of self, and sacrifice all of individual comfort and enjoyment to 
further the comfort and the wishes of another, yet finds her 
every effort turned against herself, and armed withacutest woe? 
In such cases, and who shall say there are none such, where cau 
woman turn, but to her God? Where find consolation, save in 
the belief that her innocence, her efforts, rest with Him, and He 
will one day make them known ? Where shall her heart, 
bleeding and torn from its earthly rest, find peace, save in His 
.ove ? Oh ! what woman bearing the name of Israel, can hesitate 
one moment to pour forth her every grief to him, and feel she 
i? individually his care, and He will plead her cause ? 

The express commands relating to the marriages of the priests 
is another beautiful proof of woman’s perfect equality in Israel, 
and compatibility to be holy unto the Lord, by sharing the 
6 


172 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


holiness of his elected servants ; a proof, also, that in His service 
the Eternal demanded no sacrifice of human affections. They 
were, indeed, to be sanctified to Him, to be infused with His 
spirit, and so to become a blessing and a joy to His servants ; 
but never to be annihilated, and so give temptation for the most 
awful abuses and crimes, as in the monastic seclusions of tins 
Roman church. The sanctity, the purity, which was to attend 
the wife of the priest, was a further incentive to the purity and 
holiness of the women in Israel. Superiority of actual ranks 
there was none, but superiority in virtue there was, and to gain 
that superiority was in the power of all women under the guid- 
ance of the law. The priests were the very highest and noblest 
in the sight of the people, being the elect of the Lord, and the 
ministers of His will. How pure, then, and boly, must have 
been the ambition to become worthy of selection as the priests’ 
wives ; and how beautifully is the superior holiness and sanctity 
of the women of Israel brought forward by the simple fact that 
the priests of the Lord might only choose a wife from “ their own 
people 1” 

It is evident, then, from every law we have regarded, that, 
instead of being degraded and enslaved, the wives in Israel were 
peculiarly and especially objects of the Eternal’s love. For their 
safety, their honor, those laws were issued, now recognised by 
the greater part of the civilized world ; and all those who deny 
this shake the very foundations of the whole system of morality, 
under whatever creed it may be found. The Gentile is in very 
truth “ debtor to the Jew ” for far more than he acknowledges ; 
for every law unconsciously guiding and sanctifying his domestic 
relations, refining his own conduct, elevating his own mind, for 
every law blessing his home with a faithful wife, respected 
mother, and duteous child. That, therefore, any woman can 
fling odium on the Jewish law, can only excite our pity towards 
her. The innocence, honor and purity, and domestic, social, 
and religious duties of wives, being more clearly and unanswer- 
ably developed in the sacred canon of the Mosaic law than in 
any other, from the very simple fact that every other is founded 
apon them. 


173 






PERIOD 


II. LAWS FOR WIDOWS. 


CHAPTER IV. 

LAWS RELATING TO THE WIDOWS AND 
DAUGHTERS OF ISRAEL. 

Before regarding the laws instituted for the widows of 
Israel, let us pause one moment on the full tide of anguish and 
unprotected isolation comprised to woman in that one word 
M widow,” that we may comprehend our Father’s love to the 
full extent. What woman’s heart, awake to kind and generous 
feelings, can look upon a widow without sympathy — without 
the yearning prayer that consolation may be granted her, and 
her fatherless babes find friends to guide them through a 
stormy world ? We know no description so thrillingly power- 
ful of this, the heart’s desolation, as the lines we subjoin. 

*• Lone sharer of a widowed lot, 

Where is the language, though a Seraph hymned 
The poetry of heaven, to picture thee, 

Wrecked as thou art, whose life has now become 
Affliction's martyrdom ? for such is love 
Doomed to remain on desolation' s rock , 

And look for ever where the past lies dead 
What is the world to thy benighted soul ? 

A dungeon ! Save that where thy children’s tones 
Can ring with gladness its sepulchral gloom. 

Placid and cold, and spiritually pale 

Art thou. Tne lustre of thy youth is dimmed, 

Ths verdure of thy spirit o’er. In vain 
The beaming eloquence of day attracts 
Thy heart’s communion with creation’s joy. 

Like twilight imaged on a bank of snow 
The smile that waneth o'er thy marble cheek." 

Robert Montgomery. 

Such, indeed, is the earthly sadness of the widow. One 
with him who has departed, how may she tread the earth’s 
dark vales alone ? Where look for love to supply the place of 
that now gone ? Where find a father for those babes, clinging 
to her for tha*t support, that love, which in her first bereave* 


174 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


ment slie feels utterly unable to bestow ? Where but in Him, 
who in His law so especially provides for her and for her father- 
less children ; and, by his prophets, reinforces the statutes 
already given, and brings forward their neglect as one of the 
manifold sins which called down His displeasure ? 

We find in his gracious word not alone the command, but 
the severe penalty attached to its disobedience, first in Exodus 
xxii. 22, 23, 24 : “ Ye shall not afflict any widow or fatherless 
child. If thou afflict them in any wise, and they cry at all 
unto Me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath shall wax 
hot, and I will kill you with the sword ; and your wives shall 
be widows, your children fatherless.” 

Can any language more emphatically and forcibly denote the 
tender mercy of the Eternal ? His love made their sorrows 
His own. As a positive sin against Himself, He threatened to 
afflict all those who dared afflict them by the infliction of simi- 
lar suffering. He knew that, left to man’s mercy, the widow 
and the fatherless would often meet with oppression, fraud, and 
injustice ; be defrauded of their natural rights, and afflicted by 
hard creditors. Not only as a widow, called upon to bear 
“ affliction’s martyrdom,” but as a mother, to behold her chil- 
dren a prey to suffering and want. In Israel this could not be. 
The widow and the fatherless were God’s own, for He knew 
that not alone the wife, but the mother must be cared for. 

“ Leave thy fatherless children to Me,” He said by His pro- 
phet Jeremiah, at a time when misery, desolation, and destruc- 
tion were falling on Judea and her sons for their awful iniquity. 
“ Leave them to Me, and I will keep them alive. And let thy 
widows trust in Me.” Even then, when disobedience and 
idolatry had so cursed the land, that His wrath could no longer 
he withheld, He reiterated the gracious promise given in Ilis 
aw. Sunk into the lowest ebb of iniquity, how could the 
widow and orphan be protected if left to the care of man ? 
Where might they look, at such a season, but to their God, 
who for them alone had mercy and long suffering still ? 

The ruin and worldly misfortunes and trials, so often now the 
portion of the widow, could not exist in Israel. The nation at 
large was commanded to provide for them, and in every feast 
of offerings or of festivals, and in the ingathering of their corn, 
and oil, and fruits, to include the widow and the fatherless ; 
laws not once, but several times repeated. “ When thou cuttest 


PERIOD II. LAWS FOR WIDOWS. 175 

down thy harvest in thy field, and hast forgotten the sheaf in 
the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it, but it shall be for 
the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that the 
Lord th}. God may bless thee in all the works of thy hands. 
When thou beatest thy olive tree thou shalt not go over the 
boughs again, it shall be for the stranger, the fatherless, and 
the widow. When thou gatherest the grapes at thy vineyard, 
thou shalt not glean it again, it shall be for the stranger, the 
fatherless, and the widow.” 

Nor was this all. The tithes of wine, corn, and oil, the first- 
lings of herds and flocks, all of which were devoted to the 
service of the Lord, that all worldliness and niggardliness should 
be banished from Israel, and “ they should learn to fear the 
Lord their God always.” The feast of Weeks and of the Taber- 
nacles, when the families of Israel rejoiced before the Lord in 
the place which He chose, the widow and the fatherless 
were included. There was to be no affliction, no dependence, 
no sorrow in Israel (though the poor were not to cease out of 
the land) at these times. All were to rejoice before the Lord. 
And yet more in addition : “ At the end of three years thou 
shalt bring forth all the tithe of thine increase the same year, 
and lay it up within the gates. And the Levite, because he 
hath no part nor inheritance with thee, and the stranger, and 
the fatherless, and the widow, which are within thy gates, 
shall come, and shall eat and be satisfied, that the Lord thy 
God may bless thee in all the work of thine hand which thou 
doest.” And so important was obedience to this statute, that 
its profession was necessary in the confession of him who came 
to offer the basket of first-fruits, as a sign of his having come 
unto the land of his inheritance. “ Then shalt thou say,” pro- 
ceeded the instruction of the priest, “ before the Lord thy God, 
I have brought away the hallowed things out of mine house, 
and also have given them to the Levite and the stranger, and 
the fatherless and the widow, according to all thy command- 
ments which thou hast commanded. I have not transgressed 
thy commandments, neither hare I forgotten them” (Deut. 
xxvi. 12, 13). 

Again, in Deut. xxiv. 17, it is not enough that we have 
already heard, “ thou shalt not afflict them,” under the awful 
penalty of similar affliction from the hand of God, but prohibi- 
tion as to the manner of that affliction is expressly pointed out 


I7G 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


•‘Thou shalt not pervert the judgment of the stranger, nor of 
the fatherless, nor take a widow’s raiment to pledge.” Why ! 
Because they had no earthly friend to redeem the latter, or plead 
for the former. Weak and unguarded, they were exposed to 
all these evils, had not the Eternal, in His tender compassion, 
taken them under His own especial care ; and, instead of com- 
pelling them to depend on the insecure tenure of man’s com- 
passion, or even justice, instituting laws for their benefit, the 
disobedience of which was sin unto Himself. 

Had these laws been obeyed, it was impossible for the widow 
and the fatherless, however destitute they might have been left, 
to suffer mere worldly ills. The agony of the widowed wife 
could not be increased by the thought of bow she was to pro- 
vide for her fatherless little ones. The Lord was their guardian, 
and He gave her and her children the gentle care and affection 
of their brethren in Israel ; bidding her cry unto Him in sorrow 
or affliction, for He would assuredly hear her cry, and punish 
those who called it forth. 

What nation, then, what code, however just, however perfect, 
ever framed such laws as these ? “ What nation,” in truth, 

“ has God so near to them as Israel in all we call upon 
Him for ?” Were no other laws relative to woman instituted, 
these alone would be sufficient to mark that their very weakness 
rendered them objects, even more than man, of compassion and 
love ; for where has God provided for man as for woman in the 
desolation of her widowhood ? 

That modern Judaism cannot obey these laws now, as 
when they were given, interferes not with the fact of their 
institution itself. ThL very charge, reiterated, enforced as it 
is, elevates woman, and excites towards her, not alone the 
humanity and tenderness, but the respect of man. How could 
he feel otherwise towards those whom God Himself has pro- 
mised to protect ? What stronger incentive could he have to 
be forbearing and gentle towards her, and in no way to afflict 
her, than that if he failed in kindness, his wife should be 
widowed, his children fatherless ? Where shall we find a 
law to disannul this, proceeding, as it does, from the mouth 
of God? 

To the women of Israel, at the present day, how inexpressibly 
consoling are these laws ! In form they can no longer be 
obeyed ; but, as in the case of the statutes relating to wives, it 


PERIOD H. LAWS FOR WIDOWS. 179 

is the spirit pervading them which we must take to our hearts, 
till they swell in grateful thankfulness to Him who from Hi& 
throne in heaven condescends to make widows His especial 
care. And He does so now as then. God is immutable — a 
Spirit of Truth, knowing not the shadow of a change ; and, 
therefore, do we know and feel that the same love from which 
issued those beautiful laws, actuates His dealings with his 
people now. It is vain, utterly vain, to say we are cast off, 
and, therefore, cannot claim it. The Bible teems with passages 
relating to our banishment alone, and to the Eternal’s deep love 
borne towards us while in captivity, and, consequently, towards 
us now. We could multiply passages on passages, from the 
Pentateuch, Psalms, and Prophets, to prove this. But the very 
words a!»-e,ady quoted from Jeremiah would be almost sufficient. 
When they were pronounced, the sins of Jerusalem were far 
more heinous than those of Israel in her captivity. Yet even 
then God took the fatherless and the widow under His fostering 
care ; separating them for the innocence of the one, and the 
unprotected weakness of the other, from the mass of iniquity 
which desecrated J udea. 

As concerns His compassion towards us now, we shall find 
them so distinctly, so clearly enforced in Leviticus xxiv., 
particularly from verse 40 to the end, and in the whole of 
Deuteronomy xxx., that to doubt and keep back, from a suppo- 
sition of our inability to approach our God, and claim His love 
in our captivity, becomes actual guilt, and is likely not only to 
throw a wider and wider barrier between Him and ourselves, 
but to expose us more dangerously than any other temptation 
to the sophisms of the Nazarene, who, in mistaken kindness, 
would terrify us from our sole rock of refuge and strength, by insist- 
ing that, cast out from the Lord’s favor as we are, nothing can 
save us from eternal perdition but the acceptance of their faith. 
The more solid sense and unimpassioned reason of man may, 
and do, effectually guard him from such danger ; but woman’s 
quicker feeling and more easily blinded judgment need all the 
defence and rest in a divine love which the study of her own 
fa;th, and its manifold manifestations of the Eternal as a God 
of truth and love, alone can give. No argument is more likely 
to weigh with a strong-feeling, unguarded woman, knowing 
little or nothing but the mere formula of her own religion, than 
.he idea, if pressed at a right moment, that the law of Moses » 


11 8 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


a law of fire and blood, given only to destroy, and that the 
religion of Jesus is one of love ; that Jewish women can have 
no comfort in adversity, but that as Chiistians they will find all 
they need ; that in the one Faith they must feel themselves 
degraded, as in the other exalted and secure. 

Now, without affecting actual creed at all, temptations iike 
these, unless fully and faithfully convinced that we, as women 
of Israel, have privileges still higher, must on some dispositions 
fall with sufficient weight as so to confuse and entangle, that 
even belief is adopted ere we are at all aware of what we are 
about. We allude not to those whom reason only guides — 
who, cold, unimaginative, passionless themselves, laugh at feel- 
ing, because they know it not — who find philosophy always 
sufficient for their need. But the larger portion of women, crea- 
tures of mere feeling and impulse, we would beseech to come 
to the Word of God, and derive thence, in the days of youth 
and happiness, that peace, love, and consolation, which if 
unknown till “ the evil days come, and the years when thou 
shalt say, I have no pleasure in them,” may be sought, from 
very blindness and wilfulness, in a stranger fold. The argu- 
ments we have quoted would fall to the ground by the simple 
answer, that as women of Israel, we have all we need ; that 
God revealed His deep love to us ages before He became known 
to our Gentile sisters ; that while we possess His blessed Word, 
we can never feel too unworthy to claim the tenderness he so 
proffers. He Himself has given us privileges in every relation 
and position in life which no other nation has, except as derived 
from us, and that, instead of fire and blood, the whole Jewish 
law to woman teems with love. 

These feelings, inculcated in childhood, felt and experienced 
in riper years, will be sufficient for woman, and enable her to 
realize all the blessed consolation which every law relating 
to her so spiritually bestows. Not to widows only, but to all 
who are in affliction, the Divine spirit infusing every law must 
bring comfort, by evincing how closely, how consolingly, she is 
drawn to God. 

Can the widow and the fatherless in Israel recall this truth, 
yet not bless God that the record of His law is still our own, 
granted that in times of dispersion and banishment we might 
not despair, even though the form of the law n ust be, till our 
restoration, at an end? Oh, let the afflicted take comfort! 


PERIOD II. LAWS FOR WIDOWS. l79 

She has but to believe and obey, and the deep compassion of 
her God will perfect both, and render them acceptable. Let 
her but think on the magnitude of that love which has pro- 
vided for her both as widow and mother. That by name she is 
singled out as especially the object of Divine solicitude, and, 
therefore, that the Eternal knew and knows the heaviness of 
her trial, the extent of her deep sorrow, the pressure of her cares. 
Let her recall every law given for the widow and the fatherless, 
and remember that He who gave them knows not the shadow 
of a change, and, therefore, feels for her now as tenderly as He 
did for her ancestors of old. What is time to Him ? Wo 
look back with our finite gaze, and think there is such a wide 
distinction between past and present, that the laws given for 
the one can in no way concern the other. Customs, manners, 
all of earth may change, but not the nature of the immortal 
soul, nor of the human heart. From the beginning of the 
world, until the end, these were , are , and will be the same. 
And so is He from whom they spring, and who guides and 
cares for them now as when He first grafted them into man. 
What, then, is time to Him ? Can frail finite humanity believe 
that time has changed His tenderness towards His afflicted 
children ? Oh ! who would throw such scorn, such disrespect 
on that word which repeats and enforces in every manner of 
expression, “ I, even I, am He, that changeth not ; therefore ye 
sons of Israel are not consumed ? ” Let the widows of Israel 
take to their hearts every law which manifests His love towards 
Lem as widows. They are as much theirs now as at the 
moment they were given. Let them not believe, for a single 
moment, that the superior holiness of their ancestors gave them 
greater favor in the sight of their God. He saith, “ Not for 
your own sakes will I do this, O Israel, for ye are a perverse 
and rebellious generation, but for the sake of the covenant I 
swore unto your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” And 
again, in strong confirmation, “ For mine own sake, even for 
mine own sake, will I do it ; for how should my name be pol- 
luted : and I will not give my glory to another.” (Isaiah 
xlviii.) With such words how may we hesitate ? Come unto 
Him, ye widows of Israel, for ye are His. Clasp to your 
hearts "ilis love. Think not ye can weary it, for “God is not 
man, that He should lie, nor the son of man that he should 
repent.” Let no thought of unworthiness keep us back, for not 


180 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


in our own righteousness, but in His, must we trust. And oil 
believe in Him, trust in Him ; and, as the widows of old, in 
our very affliction we shall be comforted, and to the Gentile9 
show forth His glory. 

Our next section, the Daughters of Israel, while it principally 
relates to the duties of our younger sisters as inferred from the 
laws concerning them, also brings much important matter tc 
light, regarding the equality of women. 

In every command and ordinance relative to obedience to 
parents, to the eating of holy things (Levit. xi. 14; Deut. xii. 
and xvi.), to appearing and rejoicing at the various festivals 
(Deut. xvi.), daughters, equally with the sons, are so emphati- 
cally specified, that it is impossible to believe that the religious 
as well as the moral duties of the law r are not equally incumbent 
on woman as well as man. It is useless to transcribe the verses 
which point this out, as they will be found, in their own simple 
force of expression, in the chapters of the Lord’s own Word 
quoted above. Were the maidens of Israel to keep aloof from 
all religious observances, to be bound to household duties and 
frivolous employments, become authorized to leave all the con- 
cerns of an immortal soul and of eternity to the care of fathers, 
husbands, or brothers, we should find no mention of such a class 
of beings. Nay, had the Eternal even intended that their fitness 
or unfitness for His service should depend on the judgment of 
man, we should still find only the sons mentioned. But to 
remove this entirely, the attendance of the maidens of Israel at 
every rejoicing, etc., becomes an absolute command from God, 
and its disobedience, neglect, or change, was sin against Him- 
self. Such laws as those of Mezuzzot or Tephilim were given 
in an indeterminate manner, requiring the aid of the priest to 
decide who should wear the latter, and how use the former ; 
but the obedience of the daughters of Israel, with their brothers, 
unto every ordinance, is so clearly and simply put, that the 
mind must indeed be perverted who would seek to deprive them 
of such blessed privileges, and insist that religion is too deep a 
thing for woman. 

God bade woman as well as man love Him with heart, and 
soul, and might ; knowing that to all who did so, the compre- 
hension of His will, His attributes, was comparatively easy, and 
obedience to His every statute a labor of rejoicing and love. Tc 


PERIOD II. LAWS IOR DAUGHTERS. 181 

.eai n and to feel this in youth, woman, equally with man, must 
be taught to know and love the Lord, not left to the mere prac- 
tice of forms ; must be taught, that to appear at His festivals, to 
keep His ordinances, to obey His commandments, are privileges 
of joy, granted to them in the fulness of God’s love, and mark 
the distinction between His rule and that of every other. They 
would be led to compare their station and their privileges as 
maidens of Israel, with those of the women of Greece and Rome, 
and every contemporary nation, and, in more modern times, 
with the women of many a Gentile land. Civilization, and a 
study and practice of the moral laws of the Bible, are doing 
their work, and pervading the customs and feelings of theNaza- 
rene world ; but their guiding law breathes not the Eternal’s 
especial care for woman, in her every relation of life, more for- 
cibly than ours does. 

That the daughters of Israel must have had the power to 
obtain influence over their fathers, even to persuade them to 
evil, is proved by their being specially named in the law already 
quoted, regarding the punishment of all those, be they brother, 
*on, daughter, wife, or friend, who enticed to idolatry. 

Again, we are told in Deut. vii. 2, 4, alluding to the care 
needed to preserve the Israelites a holy people, and prevent all 
communion with the idolatrous nations around : “ Thou shalt 

make no covenant with them, nor show mercy to them ; neither 
shalt thou make marriages with them ; thy daughter thou 
shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take 
unto thy son. For they will turn away thy son from following 
me, that they may serve other Gods, etc. For thou art an holy 
people unto the Lord thy God. The Lord thy God hath chosen 
thee to be a special people unto Himself, above all the people 
that are upon the face of the earth.” 

“ Son,” in the sentence “ for they will turn away thy son,” 
etc., evidently signifies both son and daughter, as both are spe- 
cifically named in the preceding verse, and the Hebrew word 1?, 
though always translated sow, is equivalent to the English noun 
child, for which there is no distinct Hebrew term. “ Children 
of Israel,” is written in Hebrew exactly as if it were translated, 
“ sons of Israel” but it evidently and unanswer- 

ably includes both sexes, by the words already quoted : 
« Gather the people together, men, women, and children,” and 
sther verses of similar import. As Israel had been already 


182 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


warned against giving bis daughter in marriage to a son o( 
Canaan, she is, of course, included in the danger thence ensu- 
ing, although only “son” is mentioned ; the plural meaning of 
that “ son” being evident from the pronoun following it being 
they instead of he. “ For they will turn aside thy child from 
following me, that they may serve other gods ” 

Now if nothing depended on women in Israel to uphold and 
make manifest the glory of their God, in obedience to IJis law 
and in serving Him, what necessity was there for this law ? If 
her soul was of less moment than that of man, why should it 
have been so carefully guarded from pollution ? This law of 
itself would be sufficient to prove to the daughters of Israel their 
solemn responsibility, not only individually, but nationally ; 
and we shall find still more. 

In Numbers xxvii., we read that the daughters of Zelophehad 
eame “ before Moses, and all the princes of the congregation,” 
and, boldly stating the death of their father without sons, 
inquired, “ why should the name of our father be done away 
from among his family because he had no sons? Give us, 
therefore,” they continued, “ a possession among the brethren 
of our fathers. And Moses brought their cause before the 
Lord. And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, The daughters 
of Zelophehad speak right. Thou shalt surely give them a 
possession of an inheritance among their father’s brethren, and 
thou shalt cause the inheritance of their father to pass unto 
them. And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying 
If a man die, and have no son, then shall ye cause his inherit- 
ance to pass unto his daughter.” 

Now this simple narration very clearly proves that the civil, 
as well as religious privileges were protected and insured. Here 
are five unmarried women, most probably young, and acting on 
no guidance but their own sense of right and justice, as incul- 
cated by the whole law of Moses, unhesitatingly addressing their 
great Lawgiver, in presence of all the .heads of Israel, and fear 
lessly stating their case. Their position must have been one ol 
perfect freedom, or they could not so have sought Moses, and 
not only been heard, but, because he did not feel himself ade- 
quate to pronounce a decision on a case never before occurring, 
their cause was brought by him before the Lord, and God Him- 
self deigned to reply. They had spoken right, the Eternal said ; 


JPKRJOD II. LAWS FOR DAUGHTERS. 183 


ihe inheritance should be as they said, not only to them, bul 
ever after, as a law in Israel. 

We see here, not only the daughters of Israel protected and 
established in their birthrights, but the practical illustration of 
the Eternal’s gracious promise repeated in Deut. x. 17, IS, “ For 
the Lord your God is a God of gods and Lord of lords, a mighty 
and a terrible, who regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward, 
but does execute the judgment of the fatherless and the 
widow.” The daughters of Zelophehad were fatherless ; per- 
chance (for such is human nature), surrounded by those who 
disputed their right, deeming that woman could have no civil 
privileges ; compelled to do violence to their feminine nature, 
and make an appeal ; whereupon God, not man, te ok their judg- 
ment in His own hands and gave them right. The supposition 
of their having to encounter human opposition, is further con- 
tinued by the event of the thirty-sixth chapter of Numbers. 
The chief fathers of the tribe of Manasseh, to which Zelophehad 
belonged, came before Moses and the heads of Israel, stating 
the inconvenience of female inheritance, as being likely to be lost 
by marriage with some other tribe ; and in the jubilee, when 
every man returned to the inheritance of his fathers, the portion 
inherited by daughters would be amalgamated with the inherit- 
ance of the tribe whereunto they were received. This difficulty, 
to mere human reasoning, would have seemed so to interfere 
with the statute already given, that man would have been at a 
loss how to overcome it. But that which God has once said, 
He altereth not ; and He bade Moses inform the children of 
Israel, that “the tribe of the sons of Joseph had said well. This 
is the thing which the Lord doth command concerning the 
daughters of Zelophehad, saying, Let them marry to whom 
they think best ; only to the tribe of the family of their father 
shall they marry. And every daughter that possesseth an in- 
heritance in any tribe of the children of Israel, shall be wife unto 
one of the families of the tribe of her father, that the children of 
Israel may enjoy every man the inheritance of his fathers.” 

Even in this law, so important for the peace and harmony of 
„he tribes of Israel, the Eternal disdained not to care also for 
the temporal happiness of His weaker children, by expressly 
stating, that their choice was to be whom they think best; 
oounded, indeed, by the tribe of their father, amongst whom as 
they principally associated it was most natural their choice 


184 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


should fall. No ailitrary law interfered with domestic hap pi 
Hess. Neither consanguinity, fortune, nor any of the moderi 
reasons, impelling unions of convenience, of ambition, or of any 
kind but of the heart, interfered with woman’s own choice of 
happiness. Heiress in her own right, with none daring to in- 
terfere with the judgment of God Himself, she might selecl 
whom she thought best to share the possessions accorded to 
her. No human judgment, no thought of man, would have so 
cared for woman. The law, indeed, might have been given, but 
those impressive words, “ Let them marry whom they think 
best,” speak but of the omniscient care and infinite love of God. 

The law of vows we have already enlarged upon in our second 
section, the wives of Israel ; yet, as its ordinance concerns the 
daughters of Israel also, we must briefly recur to it. The nature 
of those vows, and in what manner they are liable to abuse, we 
have already seen. A daughter might, perhaps, more easily 
than a wife, devote herself by a singular vow to the service of 
ihe Lord, but more easily also be led into its abuse. A young 
woman (for it is to such the laws refer — see Numbers xxx. 16), 
while in her father’s house,, performs her duty to her God, and 
proves her zeal in His service to greatest perfection, while evinc- 
ing her obedience to the fifth commandment, and devoting 
herself as much as possible to the comfort and happiness of her 
parents, and to all the unobtrusive claims of home. This, as 
we have said before, is often neglected during the early enthu- 
siasm of first religious impressions, and the wish to do some- 
thing great and striking, to evince the fervor of her professions, 
occupies the mind to the exclusion of all else. This, in Israel, 
is effectually guarded against, by rendering the daughter de- 
pendent in some measure on the will of her father, and by so 
doing increasing the veneration, love, and submission, which, 
did she obey the fifth commandment, she could not fail to bear 
him, at the same time guarded, like the wife in Israel, from all 
capriciousness or indecision, and the petty trials thence pro- 
ceeding. 

That she had the power, even when in her youth in he» 
father’s house, of devoting herself by a vow unto the Lord, 
clearly evinces that even young women had access to the Eter- 
nal, and their prayers and service were graciously accepted by 
Him, without any interference of man. 

This is the spirit of the law concerning us most nearly now 


rEKIOD II. LAWS FOR D A U- OUTERS. J 85 

and which every young daughter in Israel should lovingly 
remember, that young, lowly, weak as she is, and dependent as 
she may be, she has yet the glorious privilege of devoting her 
self to the service of her God. No longer, indeed, by a singular 
vow, calling upon her to depart from home duties, and affections, 
for outward service, nor by a binding oath to afflict the soul by 
departure from her usual food and innocent amusements, but 
simply by associating the love of God and hope of His approval 
with all her thoughts, and the meek and unpretending effort to 
make manifest spirituality and holiness in every action, every 
trial, every blessing of her life. This will be less difficult to 
accomplish if she do but study, heartfully and prayerfully, His 
precious word, and read there, borne out by the whole beautiful 
world of nature, the blessed record of God’s unfailing love ; if 
she will but persevere in trust and prayer, and not despair if 
many many times she turns seemingly unanswered from the 
Fount of living waters, and her earthly nature tempt her tc put 
her a hole trust in “cisterns, broken cisterns that will hold no 
water.” This was Israel’s sin, which, more powerfully than any 
other, at length hurled on her the Eternal’s long-averted wrath ; 
and, knowing this, we shall sin threefold now if we strain not 
every nerve to resist all such specious coloring of earth, and 
cleave under every difficulty, spite of disappointment, of despond- 
ency, of doubt, unwaveringly to the Lord. 

But let not the young daughter of Israel, rejoicing in her fond 
enthusiasm that she is so specially designated in His law, 
believe that to do His work is easy and all joy, as at first it 
seems. There must come a time, if she truly seek and pray to 
love Him, that He will try that love ; not, it may be, with the 
afflictions publicly acknowledged as such, but with the coldness, 
deadness, utter stagnation of the spirit, as if all of religion, or 
even intevest in religious things, had entirely departed. This 
is the most fearful period in the religious experience of the 
young. They doubt every feeling of piety which had been 
theirs before. They mentally ask, why should they be different 
to their more worldly companions, who are ever happy, ever 
gay ? Why should they voluntarily resign such pleasures for a 
service that, instead of bringing comfort, does but make them 
miserable ? Were they not over presumptuous to have supposed 
for a moment that God could care for such as they, and would 
it not be wiser and better to join the multitude, who, living but 


186 


TIIE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


for earth and time, never cast a thought on heaven and eteruty 
for to whom can they express feelings so impossible to ba 
believed or understood ? 

Oh ! let not such periods of trial turn the daughter of Israel 
from that better path which an earlier age has chosen. Come 
indeed they must, for God thus tries the extent of His children’s 
love. The truly, sincerely, spiritually religious of every creed, 
of every class, have experienced all that they may feel. It is 
the dread “ phantom of the threshold,” which must be resisted 
by its only all-subduing foe — that faith which can ascend on 
the wings of prayer, and trust in God to give comfoit, hope, 
and joy. It is no proof of superior holiness, of more rapid 
advancement in the one straight path, where these emotions are 
unknown. It is rather an unanswerable evidence that the spirit 
yet sleeps, unawakened to its weakness, its dependence. It does 
not yet know the workings of the Lord within ; or that its 
fancied strength may be broken as a reed. Oh ! let not the 
young daughter of Israel, when bowed and sorrowing beneath 
the strange despondency of heart and thought, envy these. 
God hath not departed from her. He doth but try the strength 
of her faith and love. If comfort, if spiritual joy always attended 
on religious service, where would be that necessity for faithful- 
ness and constancy ? Where the trial of love, if ever coupled 
with reward ? Where its strength, its durability, if the first 
moment the object of its aspirings appear to forsake, to darken 
His countenance towards them, it takes wing to some more 
rewarding god? Would we love a mortal thus? And shall 
we do less for God, who^e love we know to be so unending, so 
infinite, so exhaustless, and who never in reality withdraws it, 
though to try us He permits the human infirmities of frame to 
produce the darkness under which we pine ? 

Would we, in truth, follow the example of our ancestors, and 
devote ourselves to our God, we must endure this meekly and 
trustingly, as we would any more tangible evil, or more visible 
affliction. And even when this is removed, through His loving 
mercy, and again our souls spring up rejoicing, though more 
chastened, let us still “ remember the days of darkness, for thev 
shah be many.” Religion in no way saves us from afflictions, 
but it supports us under them. It gives us what nothing else 
can give, the unvarying comfort of a Father’s We, and on 
unfailing hope in heaven. 


PERIOD II. LAWS FOR DAUGhiKRH, 187 

As in former ages a young woman could not devote herself 
Dy a singular vow without the approval of her father, although 
with her spiritual feelings he had no power to interfere, so now 
let every daughter of Israel abstain from every public or pre- 
sumptuous evidence of religious profession which can interfere 
with the prejudices of her parents. The spirit of that beautiful 
religion which was granted to us, and which will again be ours, 
was “ to turn the heart of the fathers to their children, and the 
hearts of the children to their fathers not to sow dissension 
and disunion. Whatever a young woman may feel, however 
grieve at what she may think is wanting in the theoretical of 
practical religion of her parents, it is her duty to pray and wait. 
God will answer in His own time, but it is no part of her duty 
either to condemn or cease to love. No parent will interfere 
with a child’s religion, if, instead of being obtruded upon him, 
it does but guide alike conduct and feeling, impel obedience 
and cheerfulness, and strengthen to endure. The motive of these 
superior characteristics an irreligious and unbelieving parent 
may not, indeed, for long years perceive; but, almost uncon- 
sciously, he will learn to respect the prejudices of such a child ; 
and if, indeed, it may please God to permit such earthly recom- 
pense, she may be the blessed means of leading him to the 
same God, the same immortal goal. 

But this can never be if she obtrude religion, or in the 
slightest degree evince a supposition of her own superior holi- 
ness. It is indeed one of the hardest trials in life, to see any 
one of those whom we most love perseveringly reject all we 
feel the dearest, most important. But if we bring it before 
God, He will give us strength to continue constant in prayer 
for them, and lessen the evil we deplore. The case of a parent 
refusing to let his child serve God, and make religion her first 
object, is utterly unknown in Israel ; but should it be, in this 
instance only a child is imperatively called upon to disobey. 
The commands of an earthly parent must be disregarded, if 
they interfere with and compel disobedience to the commands 
of God. Leviticus xix. 29 authorizes our upholding this. 
Although the case itself, in which there is a daughter guarded 
from an unnatural father, be different in details, yet it is equally 
protective in the present instance ; and a child may be fully 
assured, if the command of her father compel disobedience to 
aer God in any one of His commandments (for all are of equal 


183 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


sanctity to the one alluded to in the verse quoted), her painful 
duty must be to disobey. 

But a state of things so fearful can never be in Israel, if a 
daughter’s religion be practised as we have hinted above. 

There may be indifference, there may be the apparent absence 
of all spiritual religion ; but no man who wishes to be thought 
an Israelite, ever neglects the peculiar forms of his faith, and his 
daughter, therefore, has no cause for dividing herself from him, 
however more earnest, more spiritual, may be her individual 
views. She may have to bear with the neglect or disregard of 
some ordinances which her heart tells her are sacred, but if she 
have the will she has the power to keep her own way undefiled ; 
and if she be truly and sincerely a daughter of Israel, overy 
parental disregard of holy things will bring her to her God yet 
more earnestly in prayer. 

One other point we would urge ere we quit the subject. Let 
not Israel’s young daughters fancy, that to devote heart, mind, 
and soul to God, demands the relinquishment of those innocent 
pleasures and enjoyments for which God himself has framed our 
hearts. There are many among the Gentiles who believe reli- 
gion wholly incompatible with recreation and amusement ; that 
all social pleasures must be resigned ; only certain books perus- 
ed and even some accomplishments forbidden, as likely to lead 
to sin. The religion of God is, on the contrary, so consistent 
with man’s capabilities and yearnings, that we never can believe 
these things incumbent upon us. The first grand object of our 
lives, in truth, it must be ; and that gained — which, if we incul- 
cate the immortal spirit of religion as well as its more perishable 
form unto our children, it will be — we need not fear that enjoy- 
ment either of social intercourse or of intellectual resources will 
turn, us from it. God has framed us to give and to receive plea- 
sure. He has stored our hearts with sweet emotions, our minds 
with inexhaustible resources. We best make manifest our deep 
and grateful sense of His loving-kindness by its enjoyment. 
“ God loveth a cheerful giver,” we have somewhere read. And 
in no religion is this sentiment so truly, practically illustrated as 
in ours, coming, as it does, from God Himself. A knowledge of 
ourselves, which, if we are accustomed in youth to examine our 
hearts by the standard of God’s word, we shall undoubtedly 
obtain, will warn us of those weaknesses and failings most likely 
to lead us into temptation ; and we shall guard against these, 


PERIOD II. LAWS FOR DAUGHTERS, 189 

and either conquer them through His infused grace, or shun 
them till the strength we implore is granted. There is no need 
to become different in seeming from our fellows, and tacitly con- 
demn and chide every innocent amusement and resource by our 
refusal to join in them. The idea that no amusement is inno- 
cent, that nothing we do, think, or feel is free from sin, is not — - 
blessed be God ! — the creed of Israel. He hath appointed our 
religious and moral duties ; He hath laid down our earthly path ; 
He hath taught us how to look to Him, and how by faith we 
shall be justified, and through His infinite mercy be received 
with Him. He hath stored our souls and minds with exhaust- 
less capabilities of happiness, even upon earth. He hath gather- 
ed around us in His beautiful world a thousand objects to call 
forth love, gratitude, and joy ; and He who is truth and justice 
would not have done these things, were we so incapable of 
righteousness, as from our birth to be blackened with such sin as 
only blood can wash away. 

Let me not be misunderstood, or accused of contradicting my 
own theory, so to speak, for my theory is the theory of the Bible. 
Liable to every weakness — more inclined to the evil than the 
good— we are; but such is inherent from the time that our hea- 
venly origin was changed and marred by the dominion of the 
passions, infirmities, and weakness of earth. And it was for 
such beings the law was given, to aid them to subdue natural 
corruption, to give them opportunities to exercise righteousness, 
virtue, and faith ; to awaken the immortal part of our nature ; 
to arouse all those better, higher, and purer feelings, which, how- 
ever dormant , cannot die, for they have been breathed into us 
by the spirit of the Lord ; and for which, if we neglect and let 
them ever sleep, because we fancy we either possess them not, or 
are too closely bound to arouse them, we shall be called to a 
fearful account. Hot one single point of the Eternal’s precious 
word — the Bible which we acknowledge — authorizes a belief in 
the Gentile creed. 

The particular mention of the superior sanctity of the priests’ 
daughters, evinces that the holiness of the fathers was shared by 
the daughters. They were to partake of the holy meats, not 
only in their youth ; but if widows, or divorced, without child- 
ren, had the power of returning to their father’s house. A fur- 
ther proof of the holiness incumbent on her as the daughter of 
the Eternal’s appointed servant, and one who had power by hei 


190 


THE WOMEN OP ISRAEL. 


conduct either to exalt or “profane her father,” we find, in Lc’it 
xxi. 9, a different and more awful death appointed for her, if she 
became sinful, than the usual mode of Hebrew executions. 
These laws, of course, cannot concern us now (though would 
that they could, our priests being, as they ought to be, the first 
in rank and consequence of our nation), but the spirit of them, 
as of every other relative to the women of Israel, tends to mark 
their equality, their elevation, and their immortal responsibility, 
so forcibly as to prevent all possible rejoinder. Were the pray- 
ers of man sufficient for the welfare of woman — had she no 
individual soul to render account of — there would be less neces- 
sity to notice the wives and the daughters of the priests than any 
other. The superior sanctity of their husbands and fathers 
would surely be more than sufficient for them. We trust, how- 
ever, we have said enough to convince our young sisters that, as 
Daughters of Israel, they have higher and nobler privileges than 
the daughters of any other race ; that their God Himself has 
deigned to give laws and ordinances for their especial guidance 
and protection, which cannot be gainsaid without verging on 
impiety. And that, therefore, much, very much, depends on 
them, one and all, to uphold His glory through their own reli- 
gious and moral dignity, and give evidence, alike to their own 
hearts, and to those nations, by word, thought, and deed, that 
they need nothing more than their own beautiful religion to guide 
them through earth and time, and fit them for eternity and he a 
ven. They can do this, and will they fail ? 


CHAPTER V. 

MAID SERVANTS IN ISRAEL, AND SUNDRY 
OTHER LAWS 

Our fifth section alludes to a class which (we say it with 
jrief) no longer exists amongst us, and, therefore, can only be 
looked apon as a still further proof of the Eternal’s loying caw 


PERIOD II. LAWS FOR SERVANTS. 191 


for His female children. It cannot guide us till once more we 
have maid-servants of our own faith amongst us. How often, 
how constantly, this subject has engrossed the thoughts and 
wishes of the writer, that by any possible means, the daughters 
of our poorer and dependent brethren could be received as 
domestics in our families, and so enable us to adhere to the 
laws framed for them, can be known but to the Searcher of all 
hearts ; for when spoken to man, the idea is received but as 
high-flown folly, impossible to be realized. If so considered by 
the mass, there is no help for it, and so it must remain till it 
please God to put His spirit once more within us, and emighten 
the darkness which, in some instances, has gathered around us, 
rich and poor. 

That it is only the rich and influential who can bring about 
reform in our poorer classes we quite acknowledge. Their reli- 
gious education must be carried on on a different basis. The 
spirit and meaning of every form must be inculcated, or they 
can never rise from the ignorance and superstition in which, 
through long ages of fearful persecution, they are plunged. The 
mind and heart alike must be enlarged ; their own dignity, 
their own responsibility inculcated ; the distinction between 
essential and local laws ; the superior, the unchangeable sanc- 
tity of the law of God, combined with reverence and love for 
the fence which good, and wise, and holy men have raised 
around it. Were these things inculcated, there would be many 
eager to accept the offers of service in Jewish families, and find 
their obedience to their God quite compatible with their duty 
tn their employers. Of course we allude not to those establish- 
ments in which but one or two servants only are kept. We 
simply mean those classes where there are upper and lower 
domestics — where one day in the week the former may not be 
called upon either for servile work, or to break through any of 
the forms which hallow the Sabbath day. There are such 
things, we have heard, as head nurses, who, even though Gen- 
tiles, have nothing to do with the servile work of their nursery 
kingdoms. Ladies’ maids, who have nothing to do but needle- 
work, dress hair, and attend to their mistress and young ladies, 
Housekeepers, even housemaids, where there are upper and 
.ovver. All these situations might, were they properly educated 
for it, be filled by the maid-servants in Israel, without interfer 
ing one tittle with their adherence and obedience to their Faith, 


192 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


riiere must, indeed, be a will on both sides, the employers 
and the employed, but were that will found, the way would 
be easy. 

Every law instituted in Israel for the safety, happiness, and 
welfare of the man-servant, mentioned by name the maid-servant 
also. In obedience to the fourth commandment, in the protec- 
, on of the tenth, in every festival and fast, every ordinance 
binding on Jewish families as well as individuals, we find the 
maid-servant expressly named ; thus proving that, though her 
actual rank was subordinate, though her duties were distinct, 
she was as carefully and tenderly provided for as the daughters 
of a family themselves. Even in the eating of holy things, 
which some might suppose a privilege only granted to the heirs 
of households, she was associated. No man could rejoice before 
the Lord by himself ; sons, daughters, widows, fatherless, men- 
servants, and maid-servants, all were included, and so distinctly 
enumerated, that not one could be omitted without a decided 
breach of law. The twenty-first chapter of Exodus and fifteenth 
chapter of Deuteronomy treat powerfully on the protection and 
kindness demanded towards male and female domestics. The 
simple words, “ they shall not go out as men-servants do,” 
reveal the loving care for their protection, that they should not 
be exposed to all the rougher labor of the field and out-door 
service incumbent on the males. To sell her to a strange 
nation, which would be the natural desire of the injurer and 
the deceiver, to conceal his sin, no man had power ; for, if he 
did so, she could not regain her freedom at the end of seven 
years, and be restored to her family, as was the law in Israel. 
If he betrothed her to his son, she was to become even as a 
daughter ; and if, as was the custom of the East, another wife 
were taken, her food, her raiment, her duty of marriage, he had 
no power to diminish. If he failed in either, she was free and 
spotless, alike in the sight of God and man. These beautiful 
laws appear, not only pretty convincing of the equality of 
female servants with their male brethren in the same class, but 
rather a startling manifestation of the falsity of the charge, that 
wives in Israel are degraded and abased. If even a female 
slave, when raised to become the wife of her master’s son, was 
to be regarded as a daughter, to retain her every privilege as 
first-selected wife, however the capricious heart of her husband 
might select another of his own rank, we rather imagine that 


PERIOD 11. LAWS FOR SERVANTS. 193 


every grade of Hebrew wives was equally protected by the 
Lord, and that *no man whatever had power to degrade them. 

All injury committed on a female servant exposed her master 
to punishment of equal severity as the injury of a male. He 
dared do her no hurt, for if he did, whether through prede- 
termination or momentary passion, she was his slave no longer. 
She had power to appeal from him to the representatives of her 
God, His priests, and she knew justice would be done her, for 
to do it was the ordinance of God. And, even without injury, 
the term of servitude was over in the seventh year. The 
extremity of destitution might have compelled a parent to sell, 
or rather to devote, his child to servitude ; or reasons less 
imperative might urge his doing so, knowing that his children, 
even though they worked, would be better provided for, and 
perhaps more easily enabled to keep every ordinance of the Lord, 
in the family of their master, than struggling on for a scanty 
subsistence, nominally free. The poor were not to cease out of 
the land, that the people might obey the words of their God, 
in which He bade them, “Open thine hand wide unto thy poor 
brother, to thy poor and to thy needy in thy land and then, 
as a practical illustration of how the hand is to be opened wide, 
we are told that when our brother a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew 
woman , has been sold, and served in a family six years, we were 
not only to let him, or her, go free, which, did we act according 
to the finite judgment of man, there would be many to think 
sufficient ; but they were to be furnished liberally out of the 
flock and the floor (i. e. barn, meaning corn), and out of the 
wine-press ; of all wherewith the Lord had blessed us we were 
to give unto them. And not satisfied with having already 
mentioned the Hebrew woman, as included with the Hebrew 
man, in these laws, the law again enforces the equal rights of 
both, by repeating, “ and also unto thy maid-servant thou shalt 
do likewise adding, with that exquisite spirit of love infused 
through every law, “ It shall not seem hard unto thee, when 
thou sendest him away free from thee, for he has been worth a 
double hired servant, in serving thee six years, and the Lord thy 
God shall bless thee in all thou doest.” Now, had there been 
no other mention of woman, these beautiful laws would have 
oeen sufficient to prove her equality with man in the sight of 
the Eternal. The illustration of these laws was given before 
the precept, in tbe Most High’s dealings with Hagar, as we have 


194 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


already seen ; as a bond-slave, and one not even of His chosen. 
He had compassion and love for her ; and that His people 
should endeavor as strongly as lay in their power to follow in 
His own paths, He laid down statutes, the obedience to which 
would make every maid-servant as much the object of her 
master’s care, tenderness, and liberality, as Hagar had been to 
Him. 

The command relative to the maid-servants’ attendance at 
the feast of holy things, on every Sabbath festival, etc., is rather 
convincing of religion being as incumbent on her as on man ; 
nay, that her master himself was liable to punishment if he 
neglected to associate her, as well as every other of his house- 
hold, in his religious exercises. 

Some over-refined natures are horrified at the idea of being 
sold to service — of the very term slave (the Hebrew word *02 1 
by the way, signifies servant or domestic also) ; and, taking up 
the position that the law of Moses countenanced similar traffic 
as the slave trade in all its modern horrors, make it the grand 
objection to regarding the religion as the revelation of God. 
Yet no one who really studies the Word of God, can entertain 
an idea so erroneous for a moment. Perpetual slavery — that 
awful sacrifice of all home affections, all human emotions, that 
horrible system which permitted man to regard his brother man 
as a beast of the field, to be bought and sold, live and die at his 
will — was utterly unknown in Israel. The term “ selling” a 
son or daughter, simply signified the receiving beforehand the 
price of six years’ labor, in which six years the slave (so called) 
was equal to his master in everything but actual labor. He 
was to share in every feast, every rejoicing, sit at his master’s 
table, listen to the law, accept every covenant of God, be 
clothed, fed, and cared for, and at the term of his release be so 
liberally treated individually, as to enable him, if he pleased, to 
quit service, and enter into independent business for himself, 01 
remain, from pure affection or voluntary relinquishment of 
freedom, for ever with his master. This was the actual state of 
slavery in Israel, productive of a three-fold good. It saved 
many a parent from beholding the utter destitution of his 
children ; gave him the means of working for himself by the 
price received for their six years’ labor, assured him of their 
temporal and spiritual welfare and of their being cared for, on their 
release, far better than he could for them, much as he loved 


PERIOD II.— LAWS FOR SERVAN1S. 105 


them ; prevented all those horrible incentives to crime and 
misery produced by the abject destitution of many a Gentile 
land ; united master and servant in the sweet and holy ties of 
brotherhood, alike of religion, tribe, and land ; subject to one 
law, worshipping one God, caring for the helpless and the weak, 
and making every household where the laws of God were 
obeyed one of heavenly harmony and love. In Israel there was 
no surplus of hands for work ; none of those fearful temptations 
to sin in being thrown out of employ, in the inability to meet 
the heavy taxes and other drains upon the pocr. The law in 
its every item spoke of God, and revealed Him as a God of 
love. He alone could have framed statutes entering into every 
man’s household, guiding his conduct from his parents to his 
very servants; shielding, compassionating, loving every indi- 
vidual in Israel, from the high priest to the lowest slave. 

Having now regarded all the laws instituted expressly for 
woman, in her several positions of mother, wife, widow, daughter, 
maid-servant, we have but to throw together all the remaining 
statutes relating to her generally. In every offering, be it of 
trespass, of thanksgiving, or of purification, we find in Leviticus, 
Numbers, and Deuteronomy, woman was so emphatically 
included as to be the subject of laws set apart for herself. The 
ordinances were binding on both man and woman, and care 
expressly taken to mark the guiding line of obedience for both. 
The-e was nothing left for inference, but all which was neces- 
sary was distinctly laid down. In the very particular law for 
lepers, woman was named as well as man. Nothing was left 
‘o human judgment ; every item concerning its treatment, its 
car-:, and its purification, precisely written down. In the laws 
for the Nazarite (Numbers vi.), woman is specified so clearly, 
that it is utterly impossible to retain a doubt of her service 
being equally acceptable, or that she had not the same power 
as man, to separate herself by a vow unto the Lord. That 
which was to guide man in this devotion, must equally have 
been given to guide her, or we should not see it so expressly 
stated, “ when man or woman shall separate themselves to vow 
the vow of a Nazarite,” etc. A woman who could wish to 
devote herself, appears to us to have been an independent 
single woman, and, therefore, not one of the daughters and wives 
specified in the latter law regard:' ng vows, which, judging from 
9 


196 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


the beautiful precision of the laws of God, would, had it alluded 
to the Nazarites, have been so expressed. The singular vow 
mentioned in Leviticus xxvii., including, as every other ordi- 
nance, woman as well as man, may or may not relate to the 
same kind of vows as mentioned in Numbers xxx. But whether 
it be or not, the law for the respective valuation of male and 
female service, proves that woman could make a singular vow, 
and either fulfil or redeem it with equal freedom and acceptance a? 
man. That her service was valued at a less rate, is no proof of her 
inequality, but simply that the service she could render the Temple 
was, from the weakness of her frame, and the retiring nature of 
her sex, of less use and importance than man’s. Compare the 
work and capability of a man from the age of twenty to sixty, 
to those of a woman during the same period. There would be 
full the worth of “ twenty shekels” difference. After the age 
of sixty, or in early childhood, the difference of valuation was 
much less, because the capabilities of both drew nearer each 
other. We see, then, the real meaning of these differing esti- 
mations. The law of God, while it elevates and spiritualizes 
woman to an equal share of immortality and responsibility 
before Him, in no way permits or encourages her coming unduly 
forward or exalting herself above man. Her weaker frame, her 
less mighty mind, her more easily excited emotions, all mark 
the necessity of a more retiring and dependent station. She 
may contend for equal earthly rights, she may deem our asser- 
tion of her inferior capabilities of frame and mind an unfounded 
aspersion cast upon her, she may say she is equally independent, 
equally strong, in reason and power, yet to prove this, we fear 
she will not fiud quite so easy. Certainly not by the word of 
God, her only sure test of reason and feeling. And how much 
more just and graceful is her voluntary adherence to her own 
allotted path, and her determination to adorn that path with all 
the winning qualities, the devotedness, the affections, peculiar to 
her own sex, than the vain struggle to be in all things as man ; 
a struggle in which she can but make manifest her weakness, 
and finally be so vanquished, that even her natural claims are 
denied her, or conceded as a favor, not as a right. 

The equality which we contend for (and which we uphold is 
bo clearly demonstrated, in not only our holy law itself, but in 
the mention of every female of the Bible), is not, in our capa- 
bility, our station, humanly considered, but simply as irnmorlal 


PERIOD II. MISCELLANEOUS LAWS. 197 


children of the Most High ; having equal access to nis gracious 
ear, equal power to win his condescending reply, equal respon- 
sibility in the performance of our every duty, in the just exer- 
cise of our several faculties ; which faculties, so peculiarly adapted 
by our merciful Father to our wants, happiness, and duties, are 
of equal valuation in His sight as those of man. This is woman’s 
equality, proved by the very law which, by some misguided 
spirits, may be twisted into her abasement. What would be 
the need of marking her human valuation, if she had not the 
power of devoting herself by a singular vow unto the Lord, in 
any period of her life, from a month old to above sixty ? Or, 
if she have no access to God, save through man, what could be 
the use of her vow ? Were she to be degraded morally and 
mentally, whe”e would be even her inclination for this spiritual 
service ? Surely there need not have been any reference to her 
in this law, if the women of Israel were to be considered slaves 
and heathens. 

By this tv enty- seventh chapter of Leviticus, we see too that 
female infants might be devoted by their parents to the Lord, 
another beautiful and unanswerable manifestation of their per- 
fect equality with their brothers from their very birth, and must 
entirely do away with the idea that has been so idly brough* 
forward, that the festival attending the naming of male children 
in Israel, compared with the quiet reception of the female, at 
once proves in what an inferior light the latter is regarded. 
The festivity which hails the entrance of the new-born son of 
Israel into the holy covenant of his fathers, is an immemorial 
national usage, descending to us from “ the time that Abraham 
made a great feast, the day that Isaac was weaned,” and has 
nothing whatever to do with the claims of one sex over the other. 
To my own heart, the different reception of male and female 
children is an exquisite illustration and type of their respective 
paths. The world and man must be the theatre and the fellow- 
actor of the boy ; he must go forth armed with a religious heart 
and unbending spirit to meet the temptations of pleasure, ambi- 
tion, and a host of other passions and emotions, which must 
assail his more public path. But, to the girl, home is her 
theatre, her God her only stay. Why should festivity and idle 
revelry hail the birth of one, in whose own heart must be her 
ourest pleasures, distinct from every pleasure (so called) of the 
world ; whose path must be one of quiet and unostentatious 


198 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


retirement and usefulness ? Her name is given in the house of 
God, and by one of His elected servants. Taken to the most 
holy place, which, in our captive and desolate state, His house 
presents, by that ceremony to be received into the congregation 
of His people, does the female babe need more ? Cannot the 
Hebrew mother thus realize the devoting her child to the faith 
and service of her God, more powerfully, more solemnly, than 
in even the festive circle which gathers round to hail the naming 
of her boy ? We think, were these several rites more seriously 
considered, the idle charge w r e have quoted above, merely to 
disprove it, would find little resting in the heart of our fellows. 

The express prohibition relating to woman’s adopting, on any 
pretence whatever, the garments of the male, is another beauti- 
ful ordinance marking her natural sphere, and proving that any 
departure from it was not acceptable to the Lord. Jt was not 
only the act itself which is so forcibly brought forward, that 
Deut. xxii. 5 tells us, “ All that do so are abomination unto the 
Lord, thy God,” but the thoughts and feelings included in such 
an act, the temptation to depart from the retirement, the 
modesty, the purity of that home station which woman should 
bo quietly fulfil. Were she not an equally responsible moral 
and religious agent as man, why need this law have been 
given ? 

Again, we find that women who have wrought wickedness, 
women who have a familiar spirit (that is, sought to deceive by 
pretended spells and enchantments), women who have enticed 
to idolatry — all these, as well as similar sinners amidst the 
males, were to be stoned to death on the evidence of two wit- 
nesses. Now the very power to work such wickedness, supposes 
a perfect freedom of thought and will, wholly distinct from the 
power of man. Were woman so entirely the slave of man that 
her very prayers must be guided by his, and could only be 
acceptable through him, there could be no justice in condemning 
her as a free agent; her sins must be the sins of her father or 
husband, not her own, if her merit were only acceptable through 
his. She could not possibly be bound to obey the law, or 
punished for its disobedience, if it were only given to, and incum- 
bent on, man. If she were to be made a slave and heathen, how 
does it happen that, wherever there can be a doubt as to both 
sexes being included, either in religious observances, or pro 
hibiting of customs which were abominatior unto the Lord 


PERIOD II. MISCELLANEOUS L A. W S . 199 

woman is expressly mentioned in conjunction with man ? The 
very wrath threatened in case of her trangression proves her 
equality quite as powerfully as the rewards promised to obedh 
ence, and the laws instituted for her adherence. 

Three times a year it was a positive enjoinment for every male 
to appear before the Lord in the place appointed for His temple. 
That woman was not included by name, was, instead of being a 
proof of her lesser importance and responsibility, a beautiful 
manifestation of that divine tenderness and justice, which, in 
their perfection and prescience, God only could display. A 
nameless variety of causes might intervene to prevent woman’s 
leaving her home in the distant provinces of Judea to accom- 
pany her father and husband to Jerusalem. Many a man might 
be enabled to obey the law himself, who would have been pre- 
vented doing so, had he been under a positive command to 
bring with him wife and children. 

Locomotion is man’s native element, and he can more often 
indulge in it without interfering with home duties than woman. 
It was right and just, that he who so frequently travelled for 
pleasure should do so three times a year in obedience to the will 
of God. But many causes, in her own physical inability or 
maternal anxiety in the illness of some member of her family, 
might occur to prevent woman, and therefore the law was not 
made binding upon her, as it was on man. 

That this distinct mention of “ all thy males” in no way 
degraded her, however, is clearly proved by the simple fact of 
her being required, when it was possible, and in all her positions 
in life, to rejoice before the Lord in his appointed festivals, to 
listen to the reading of His law at the Feast of Tabernacles, to 
attend to the offerings instituted expressly for her, to abstain 
from all wickedness and idolatry, and to come unto the Lord in 
every event, thought, act, desire, public or private, of her life. 
“ Ye stand this day all of you before the Lord your God,” Moses 
exclaims, in the twenty-ninth chapter of Deuteronomy ; “ your 
captains of your tribes, your elders, and your officers, with all 
the men of Israel, your little ones, your wives, and the strangei 
that is in thy camp, from the hewer of wood to the drawer of 
water, that thou shouldst enter into covenant with the Lord thy 
God, and into His oath, that He may establish thee to-day for 
a people unto Himself, and that He may be unto thee a God, 
as He hath said unto thee, and as he hath sworn unto thy 


200 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. Neither with you 
only do I make this covenant and this oath, but with him tha* 
standeth here with us this day before the Lord our God, and 
also with him, who is not here loilh us this day, lest there should 
be among you any man , ivoman, family, or tribe, whose heart 
turneth away this day to go and serve the gods of these 
nations.” 

In these few verses, and yet more powerfully in the whole 
chapter, to which we entreat our readers to turn, we have all 
which, as women of Israel, we need to seal the scriptural truth 
and basis of the position which we have adopted and set forth. 
Every class, grade, and condition of women, as of men, must 
have been present when Moses spoke these emphatic words — all 
included in the terms, “ little ones and wives.” And they 
heard, that Moses addressed not only them , but their descendants , 
lest any man, woman, family, or tribe, should, by their idol- 
atry, or other transgression, hurl down on the whole' nation the 
awful curses which he proceeds to enumerate. Would he, need 
he, have been thus particular, were the women of Israel destined 
to be but slaves to man, nonentities before God ? Alas ! what- 
ever the falsely accusing Gentile, or mistaken Hebrew, may 
assert, we have but fearful evidence in the monarch of Israel of 
the influence of woman, manifesting too terribly the prophet’s 
prescience in including her, as leading herself and man to sin, 
and so hastening the great and terrible wrath of the Lord. 

We have now drawn to the conclusion of our Second Period, 
the women of Israel’s most momentous era : the delivery and 
establishment of that law, which, in the very midst of revolu- 
tions, changes, new creeds, and their awful persecutions, — in the 
very midst of denial, abuse, and heavy darkness, — yet remains 
the hope, the guide, the protection, the defence, the elevation of 
woman, whatever her station, whatever her country, aye, and 
whatever her creed may be ; — more especially the blessed 
inheritance of the females of that people on whom our God Him- 
self bestowed it, and one, therefore, which should be their glory, 
*iheir privilege, their delight, to render so exalted, by their indi- 
vidual and national conduct, in the sight of a Gentile world, 
that none dare fling odium on the female Jewish name, or seek 
to heathenize and degrade them. 

We have sought to bring together every law relative to wo- 
man ; but the subject is so momentous, the field so wide, we 


PERIOD II. MISCELLANEOUS LAWS. 201 

can scarce hope we have accomplished it as fully as we could 
wish. We can only hope and pray, that a perusal of these pages 
may lead our sisters in Israel to seek their foundation yet more 
earnestly than the frail superstructure, and find for themselves, 
in their Bibles, all that we may have omitted, or failed to treat 
as largely as we might. The more our beautiful law is studied, 
the more must we feel, that, as women, we are especially 
objects of the Eternal’s loving protection and care ; that we are 
privileged in every feeling as well as every act to come to Him, 
alike in thanksgiving and prayer ; that we have no need what- 
ever, in obtaining our eternal welfare, for the aid and interfer- 
ence of man. The more we study, the more we must feel that 
we have, as women of Israel, a station to uphold alike before 
God and man ; that as the first, the only people to whom God 
Himself deigned to provide a law, we should be the very first in 
holiness, purity, spirituality, and divine love, amid the nations. 
We may be captives, we may be awhile under the Eternal’s 
wrath, but that truth in no way lessens our responsibility, or 
diminishes the necessity for our firmly upholding our heavenly 
heritage and guiding law. We may be captives, but, and oh ! 
let the blessed truth be remembered and clasped to our hearts, 
we are not cast off. Our chastisement is not the sign of 
divine wrath alone, but of that deep love which punisheth to 
save, to amend, to bring back to the blessed paths which we 
have deserted, not to annihilate, as in the case of so many other 
nations. Our very existence through so many centuries of dark- 
ness would alone prove this, even had we not the whole word of 
God to assert that so it would be. Every prophet abounds in 
the divine entreaty, so fraught with forbearing love, “ O Israel, 
return unto the Lord thy God ; why hast thou fallen by thine 
iniquity ?” And shall we, as women, reject these gracious prof- 
fers ? Oh, let us indeed ever come unto the Lord our God, 
and make manifest to the Gentiles, to ourselves, how deeply, 
how earnestly we feel, that alike our protection, innocence, 
honor, purity, elevation, all that can make life dear and holy, 
all that is provided to lighten our temporal toil, with eternal 
hope to strengthen our weakness, to guide our daily path, and 
bless our daily work, is of the Lord, not man. That every pure 
throb of love, every sweet tie of life, every aspiring prayer and 
grateful thanksgiving, comes from and is hallowed by Him, who, 
in His deep love, entered into the heart and home of woman, 


202 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


and so fenced them round with just and beautiful laws, that it 
was impossible to perform a single duty, social or domestic, 
parental, filial, conjugal, or fraternal, without being holy unto the 
Lord ! Can we think on this important and most blessed truth 
without lifting up our yearning hearts in the fervent prayer for 
that guidance, that blessing, which will enable us to remember 
our solemn responsibility, our heavenly heritage ; and, in the 
midst of captivity, and its varied ordeals of adversity, stagnation, 
and prosperity, that we may still join heart to heart and hand 
to hand in the persevering effort to make manifest to our God, 
that we would indeed be once more His own, and to the 
nations, that, cast off for a “ little moment” as we are, we auh 
will, and shall ever be, the chosen people of the Lord ? 


THIRD PERIOD. 


CHAPTER I. 

MIRIAM. 

Having now considered the law of God under all its various 
bearings relative to woman, it only remains to prove, from the 
female characters of Scripture, in what manner that law was 
obeyed ; and whether it be possible to discover any trace of 
statutes, which, in direct contradistinction to the changeless law 
of the Eternal, tend to degrade, instead of to elevate, the female 
character ; or whether we cannot bring forward some sufficiently 
convincing arguments in favor of our deeply studied theory, 
that the law of the Eternal is explained, by its practical illustra- 
tion, through the whole history of the Bible. 

To the oralist, or non-oralist, this consideration ought to be 
of equal weight. Keeping aloof entirely from the discussion 
which has of late too painfully agitated the whole Jewish 
nation, we would yet present to both parties the simple fact, 
that the supposed degradation of the women of Israel can have 
no existence whatever in the Oral Law, or we must find some 
trace of this abasement in this and the succeeding periods of our 
history. If both were given at the same time, the women of 
Israel whom we are about to bring forward, must have lived 
under the jurisdiction of both ; and as their lives, feelings, and 
actions, are all in exact accordance with the spirit and the form 
of the written law, it is clearly evident, that the modern 
accusation against us can have no foundation whatever in the 
Oral Law, or we must have discovered it in the female 
characters of Scripture. Nor will the groundless assertion of 
our individual inferiority and social abasement find confirmation 
in the writings of our ancient fathers, whose beautiful parables 
and tales all tend to illustrate alike the spirit of our law, and 

soa 


204 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


the axiom of our wise man, “ Who can find a virtuous woman, 
for her price is far above rubies ?” 

We will proceed, then, without further introduction, to ouf 
history, convinced that were the word of the Eternal more 
deeply studied, the love and peace it breathes must infuse 
themselves unconsciously in every human heart, and strife and 
discord melt away before the inspired transcript of the love and 
mercy of our God. 

The character of Miriam is one of the most perfect delinea- 
tions of woman in her mixed nature of good and evil which the 
Bible gives. Her first introduction we have already noticed — a 
young girl, watching, at the command of her mother, the fate 
of the ark which held her baby brother, and' boldly addressing 
the princess of Egypt in the child’s behalf. 

Her next mention is her sharing the holy triumf h of that 
brother, and responding, with apparently her whole heart, tc 
the song of praise bursting forth from the assembled Israelites 
on the shores of the Red Sea. “ And Miriam the prophetess, 
the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the 
women went out after her, with timbrels, and with dances. 
And Miriam answered them, Sing, sing ye to the Lord, for he 
hath triumphed gloriously, the horse and his rider hath he 
thrown into the sea.” 

The Hebrew word, HSOSn, here used, and translated prophet- 
ess, means also, a poetess , and the wife of a prophet, and is 
applied sometimes to a singer of hymns. In this latter mean- 
ing, and perhaps also, as a poetess, it must be applied to 
Miriam, as she was neither the wife of a prophet, nor, as in the 
case of Deborah, and afterwards Iluldah, endowed by the 
Eternal with the power of prophecy itself. She appears to 
have been one of those gifted beings, from w'hom the words of 
sacred song flow spontaneously. The miracles performed in 
their very sight were sufficient to excite enthusiasm in a 
woman’s heart, and awaken the burst of thanksgiving ; and 
Miriam might have fancied herself at that moment as zealous 
and earnest in the cause of God as she appeared to be. But 
for true piety, something more is wanted than the mere 
enthusiasm of the moment, or the high-sounding religion of 
flowing verse. By Miriam not being permitted to enter the 
promised land, it is evident that she “ had not followed tb<» 


PERIOD III. MIRIAM. 


105 


Lord fully,” but had probably joined in the rebellions and 
murmurings which characterized almost the whole body of the 
Israelites during their wanderings in the wilderness. The very 
next mention of her after her song of praise, is her presumptu- 
ous attack upon Moses, and daring insult to the power of the 
Lord, contained in the twelfth chapter of Numbers. Some 
cbronologists believe this incident occurred only one year after 
the passage of the Red Sea, a period not sufficiently long for 
circumstances to have changed the character of Miriam so corn- 
pletely, had not jealousy and presumption been secretly inmates 
of her heart before ; unknown, perhaps, even to herself, for how 
few of us know our “ secret sins,” until they are roused into 
action by some unlooked-for temptation in an unguarded 
moment, and we are startled at ourselves. 

The feelings of Miriam, recorded in this chapter, are s* 
perfectly accordant with woman’s nature, that surely no 
woman of Israel will turn from it, believing the length of time 
which has elapsed removes all the warning which it should 
inculcate. One of the most prominent of female failings is 
secret jealousy, quite distinct, however, from the fearful passion 
so called. We allude simply to that species of secret and uncon- 
fessed jealousy, which is the real origin of detraction , so often, 
unhappily, practised by woman upon woman. We are not now 
writing of any class, or creed, or people in particular, but of 
women in general. There never yet was gossip, without some 
species of detraction spoken or implied ; and never yet has 
detraction been probed candidly and fairly (disregarding the 
pain of so doing) to its root, withou': being traced to either 
jealousy or envy of some quality, or possession, of the more 
favored being so unkindly judged. 

Women, and single women more especially, are more liable 
to petty failings than men, simply because they have less to 
engross their minds, and less of consequence to employ their 
hands. Unless taught from earliest years to find and take 
pleasure in resources within , they must look without , and busy 
themselves with the characters, and conduct, and concerns of 
their neighbors. Now acknowledged merit to such characters 
gives very little food for cosy chat ; it wants esprit, and so they 
are never content, till something doubtful or suspicious is 
discovered, or supposed to be, and then the lovers of gossip 
may be found in lull conclave, marvelling, and wondering, and 


206 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


turning, and twisting, and blaming, and pitying, till the veiy 
object of such animadversion might find it difficult to trace of 
whom they speak, and know infinitely less of her own concerns, 
intentions, and feelings, than her reporters. 

As Miriam acted, so would most women, unenlightened by 
that pure spirit of religious love, which alone can conquer the 
natural inclination towards detraction, and subdue secret jealousy, 
by making us aware of its existence. “ And Miriam and Aaron 
spake against Moses, because of the Ethiopian woman whom he 
had married .” The very thing to arouse jealousy and disturb- 
ance in an unenlightened woman’s mind. 

Miriam had never been thrown in contact with her sister-in- 
law till within the last few months : Moses having sent his wife 
for safety, with his tw r o sons, to her father Jethro, during the 
troubles in Egypt and their subsequent redemption. From the 
silence with regard to Zipporah, we are led to infer that she was 
a woman of meek and retiring habits, but of course, as the wife 
of their great leader Moses, held in higher repute by the people 
than his sister. And this, trifling as it seems, is now, as it 
always has been, a trial to some of our sex. Few single women 
there are who can look upon the elevation of a brother’s wife 
without some secret feelings of pain, which will be subdued and 
changed into warmest affection, or gain ascendency* and violence, 
finding vent in petty malice or half-concealed detraction, accord- 
ing as religion, and candor, and self-knowledge are, or are not, 
predominant in the sister’s character. Perhaps it is hard, in 
some cases, to see one younger and fairer, and only known but 
a few years or months, as the case may be, usurp entire posses- 
sion of a beloved brother’s heart ; wherein we, who have been 
his hand-in-hand companions from earliest infancy, must now be 
content with but a very secondary place ; but such is one of the 
many trials peculiarly woman’s, — permitted, that from her very 
loneliness below, she may look above for that fulness of love and 
tenderness for which she yearns. And thrice happy is that 
woman who, conscious of this, can yet be content with, and 
value as before, the love her brother has still to spare for her • 
who will so subdue natural feeling as to find in very truth a 
friend and sister in a brother’s wife, and subjects of deepest inter- 
est in her children. 

Miriam, as we may infer from her punishment, was not one 
of these. That an Ethiopian should be raised above herself, whc 


PERIOD III. MIRIAM. 


207 


was a daughter of Israel, was, to one of her evidently proud 
spirit, unendurable. Unable, however, to discover aught in 
Zipporah herself for a publicly-avowed scorn, she sought to lessen 
the holiness and greatness of her brother, by daring to declare 
that the Lord had spoken through her and Aaron also. That 
this jealousy arose because of the “ Ethiopian woman whom he 
had married,” Holy Writ itself informs us; and from Miriam’s 
name being mentioned before that of Aaron, and yet more, from 
the wrath of the Lord being manifested towards her alone, it is 
eviden^ that hers was the greater sin. Her individual assump- 
tion ot prophetic power, she knew, would avail her nothing , but, 
uniting Aaron in the declaration, she sought to make it appear 
that God had breathed His spirit into every member of Am ram’s 
family. She had too much policy to endeavor to deprive Moses 
of all his granted and allowed privileges. Her only wish was, 
to decrease the value and spirituality of those privileges to him 
individually, and elevate herself and Aaron on his descent ; 
emboldened so to do by the excessive meekness and forbearance 
of Moses, which she knew would shield her from all human 
reproof. She might, perhaps, have so dwelt upon her own 
imaginary importance, as really to believe what she asserted, 
and so feel more and more galled at the little account in which she 
was held. 

It is quite possible for woman so to feel and so to act, and foi 
all to proceed from the petty feelings of jealousy and malice, 
first excited by the higher grade and more considered position 
of a brother’s wife. “Hath the Lord indeed spoken only b) 
Moses ? hath he not spoken also by us ?” were the words the) 
said ; brief, and perchance of little weight considered by them- 
selves, but in a people ever ready to revolt and murmur, more 
than likely to kindle sedition and disturbance. “ And the Lord 
heard it, and the Lord spake suddenly unto Moses, and unto 
Aaron, and unto Miriam, Come out ye three unto the taber- 
nacle of the congregation : and they three came out, and. the 
Lord came down in the pillar of the cloud, and stood in the dooi 
of the tabernacle, and called Aaron .and Miriam ; and they both 
came forth.” 

Where now could have been the presumptuous self-import- 
ance of Miriam, called thus by Him at whose word might be 
annihilation ? With what fearful terror must she have heard 
iiat summons, and listened to the reproving words of the Eter- 


208 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


Dal i — exalting Moses above even His inspired prophets ; for to 
them He declared He would make Himself known in a vision, 
and speak unto them in a dream, “ but my servant Moses is not 
so, who is faithful in all mine house. With him will I speak 
mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches ; 
and the similitude of the Lord shall he behold : wherefore then 
were ye not afraid to speak against my servant Moses ? And the 
anger of the Lord was kindled against them ; and He departed. 
And the cloud departed from off the tabernacle ; and, behold, 
Miriam was leprous, as snow : and Aaron looked upon Miriam, 
and, behold, she was leprous.” 

It is from this awful chastisement, inflicted by the Lord Him- 
self, that we must judge of the heinousness of her sin ; that 
presumption and arrogancy are no small crimes in His sight, 
and that God Himself was insulted in the insult offered to His 
chosen servant. “ My servant Moses,” He ever designates him ; 
implying the severest reproof in those simple words. Even were 
they endowed with prophetic power, He tells them they would 
be less than Moses ; for to Moses alone would He deign to speak 
mouth to mouth. Had Miriam’s sin been but the impulse of 
the moment, the reproof would have been sufficient, as we see 
in other cases in Scripture ; but, effectually to root out the sin- 
ful presumption which probably had lain dormant for months, 
the Eternal, in His perfect justice, iuflicted such chastisement as 
would cause her to be shunned and loathed by the very people 
whom she had sought to impress with her individual importance. 
Human reproof, indeed, she had not; for Moses, “meek above 
all the men which were on the face of the earth,” had not even 
answered the detracting words, conscious that his power was not 
his own, and that He who gave it, would, if needed, appear in 
his defence. Had Miriam’s heart been perfect towards God, 
neither her sin nor her punishment would have taken place. Pride 
and presumption cannot exist with true piety ; and we are there- 
fore justified in supposing, that the awful infliction was not only 
a chastisement for present sin, but to awaken her to all the 
neglectfulness and presumption dividing her from the Lord in 
years long past. She was ‘now not only to feel His stupendous 
power, but the true forgiving meekness and piety of the brother 
she had scorned and spoken against, only “ because of his Ethio- 
pian wife.” 

Stunned and appalled with the suddenness of the infliction 


PERIOD III. — MIRIAM. 


209 


and dumb perhaps from awakening shame, Miriam herself stood 
silent before Moses : and Aaron therefore appealed for her. 

“ Alas, my Lord, I beseech thee, lay not the sin upon us, 
wherein w r e have done foolishly, and wherein we have sinned 
Let her not be as one dead, of whom the flesh is half consum- 
ed as in the moment of his birth.” And Moses, without pause, 
without one word of reproof, or just indignation at being thus 
appealed to by the very persons who had sought to injure him, 
lifted up his voice in earnest prayer unto the Lord, saying, 
“ Heal her now, O God, I beseech thee.” And God heard the 
prayer, and in His infinite goodness so answered it, as to temper 
justice with mercy, promising to withdraw His hand after seven 
days, during which time, in obedience to the already instituted 
•aws for lepers, she was to be shut out from the camp. “ And 
the people journeyed not till she w r as healed.” 

As there is no further mention of Miriam, except her death, 
in Numbers xx., we may infer that her chastisement had its effect, 
and that her haughty and seditious spirit was sufficiently subdued. 
We learn, from her brief history, much to guide us as women in 
general, and much to support our position as women of Israel. 
In the former, we see in what light presumption is regarded by 
the Lord — that would we retain His favor, we must be content 
with our own position, and in no way interfere, or seek to depre- 
ciate those whom, even in our own families, it may have pleased 
Him to set above us ; that even from so small a beginning as 
jealousy of a brother’s wife, simply because she was the daughter 
of a stranger, sin gained such powerful ascendency, as to demand 
the most awful punishment for its subjection. We learn, that 
ac?ording to the nature of our transgression, so will be its chas- 
tisement. Miriam sought to raise herself not only above her 
brothel’s wife, but to an equality with that brother himself ; and, 
by the infliction of a loathsome disease, she sank at once below 
the lowest of her people. No one dared approach her ; she was 
cut off’ even from employment, from every former object of inter- 
est, banished from the camp ; and she would have thus remained 
till her death, had not Moses interfered to beseech and obtain 
forgiveness. 

The direct interposition of the Lord in punishing sin, and 
rewarding virtue, is no longer visible ; but few who study His 
word, their own hearts, and the face of the world, both past and 
present, will not acknowledge that He is still the sam^, retri- 


210 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

buting and rewarding as when His ways were made manifesto 
all. By the example of Scripture characters, He reveals to ua 
now that which is still acceptable or unacceptable to Him. Pre- 
sumption, jealousy, the scorn of individual blessings, in the 
coveting others, may no longer be punished by leprosy, but “ the 
Lord’s arm is not shortened,” and He may afflict us in a variety 
of ways, and through the very feelings which we so sinfully 
encourage. Let us beware, then, of detraction, of jealousy, of 
presumption ; for our Father in Heaven abhors these things. 
Let us look only for the blessings granted us individually, in our 
inward and outward lot, and comparing them with the sorrow- 
ing and afflicted, bless God for what He has given us ; not insult 
Him, by looking with an eye of envy only on those to whom His 
wisdom has given more. There is not a thought, not a feeling, 
unknown to Him ; and oh ! let us so guard our hearts, that we 
may be aware of the first whispering of sin, and banish it, even 
if it be in seeming but a thought. 

As women of Israel, the history of Miriam is fraught with 
particular interest, from its so undeniably proving that woman 
must be quite as responsible a being as man before the Lord, or 
He certainly would not have deigned to appear Himself as her 
judge. Were woman unable of herself to eschew sin, Miriam’s 
punishment would have been undoubtedly unjust. Nay, were 
she not responsible for feelings, as well as acts, God would not 
thus have stretched forth His avenging hand. Her feelings had 
only been formed into words, not yet into actions ; still the Lord 
punished. And would He have done so, did he not wish to 
re ake manifest, in the sight of the whole people, that both sexes 
were alike before Him ? Were woman in a degraded position, 
Miriam, in the first place, would not have had sufficient power 
for her seditious words to be of any consequence ; and, in the 
next, it would have been incumbent on man to chastise — there 
needed no interference of the Lord. We see, therefore, the very 
sinfulness of Jewish women, as recorded in the Bible, is unde- 
niable evidence of their equality, alike in their power to subdue 
sin, and in its responsibility before God. 

That the Eternal graciously pardoned at the word of Moses, is 
no proof that Miriam needed the supplication of man to bring her 
cause before the Lord, but simply that forgiveness and interces- 
sion from the injured for the injur er, are peculiarly acceptable to 
Him, and will ever bring reply. Miriam had equal power t<j 


PERIOD III. TABERNACLE WORKERS. 211 

pray and be beard, as Rebekah, Hannah, and other female cha- 
racters of Scripture ; but her punishment was no doubt to be 
increased by the painful feelings which, if she were not quite 
hardened, must have been excited by the appeal of Moses in her 
favor, and in receiving the remission of her sentence through 
nim. It at once proclaimed his power with the Lord, which she 
had sought to depreciate, and his still continued affection for 
herself. That the whole camp of Israel should halt in its march 
seven days for her alone, — that she should suffer less than were she 
shut out from her fellows in the act of travelling, argues pretty 
strongly, that her being a woman in no degree lessened her impor- 
tance, or rendered the men of Israel less careful for her comfort 
They could not have done more, had the chastised been Aaron 
in her stead. 


CHAPTER IT. 

FEMALE WORKERS OF THE TABER N ACL E.-— 

Caleb’s daughter. 

In a history of the women of Israel, we must not forget those 
who are mentioned as aiding the holy work of the tabernacle. 
Proclamation was made throughout the camp, that every man 
and woman who had a willing heart should bring an offering 
unto the Lord, either of gold, silver, or brass, blue, purple, and 
scarlet, and fine linen, and goats’ hair, and oil, and spices, and 
sweet incense, and onyx stones, and stones of all kinds ; and 
that every one who was wise-hearted among them should come 
and make all that the Lord had commanded, which Moses pro- 
ceeds to enumerate (see Exod. xxxv. and xxxvi.). The congre- 
gation then departed to their several tents, but speedily came 
every one whose heart stirred him up, and every one whom his 
spirit made willing. “And they came, both men and women, 
as many who were willing-hearted, and brought bracelets, and 
earrings, and rings, and tablets of gold,” <fcc. “And all the women 
who were wise-hearted did spin with their hands, and brought 


£12 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

that which they had spun, both of blue, and of purple, and ot 
scarlet, and of fine linen. And all the women whose heart stirred 
them up in wisdom., spun goats’ hair. The children of Israel 
brought a willing offering unto the Lord, every man and woman , 
whose heart made them willing.” In such quantities were these 
free offerings, that another proclamation was soon made ; for 
“ they spake unto Moses, saying, The people bring much more 
than enough for the service of the work, which the Lord com- 
manded to make. And Moses gave commandment, and they 
caused it to be proclaimed throughout the camp, saying, Let 
neither man nor woman make any more work for the offering of 
the sanctuary. And the people were restrained from bringing.” 

We have quoted all these verses, at the risk of being thought 
tedious, on account of the very important truths they contain. 
In the first place, we see that, notwithstanding the innumerable 
rebellions, seditions, and murmurings of the Israelites, there was 
still a vast multitude, whose hearts so stirred them up for the 
service of the Lord, as to bring more valuable offerings than 
could be used. In the text, by the constant allusion to the 
willing hearted , and to those whose spirits made them willing, 
we read, that only those gifts were acceptable which were offered 
from the heart. No mere formal profession could here avail. 
The spirit within was to be the prompter, not the outward 
appearance. In the third, the frequent mention of the wise- 
hearted, or those whose hearts stirred them up in wisdom, we 
learn, from the context, specified more especially those whom 
God Himself had gifted for the work ; and that all those arts of 
engraving, of embroidery, of weaving, of cunning work, of spin- 
ning, nay, every kind of male and female work, came originally 
as much from His inspiration, as every other higher branch 
usually denominated “ natural gifts,” “ talents,” or “ genius.” 
Spinning, weaving, engraving, and embroidery, are now so com- 
mon, that we have quite forgotten from whose inspiration they 
originally came ; and were we told that these very resources of 
the rnind and fingers should be amongst the innumerable daily 
blessings for which we should thank God, we might be accused of 
enthusiasm and religious romance ; yet who can read this chap 
ter of Exodus, without feeling the truth of our position, and 
bidding the heart glow with thanksgiving for the innocent and 
happy resources of daily life ? 

In the fourth place, by both proclamations being addressed tc 


PERIOD III. TABERNACLE WORKERS. 213 


woman as well as man, we have another unanswerable proof of 
their equality, not only in the power and freedom to bring offer- 
ings, but in their being equally gifted by the Eternal for the 
work. We peruse with admiration the self-devotion of the 
women of Carthage, when bringing together all their gold and 
silver ornaments to form arms for the defence of their city, even 
cutting off their hair to make strings for bows and other wea- 
pons ; and our admiration is just : but how much more strongly 
should it be excited towards the women of Israel of old, who, 
from pure love of God, and zeal in His holy service, brought all 
their ornaments, bracelets, earrings, tablets, lings, jewels of gold 
and silver, every article of value which they could collect, and 
set themselves, heart and hand, to spin, weave, embroider, and 
use all their talents in His service by whom they had been 
bestowed. The women of Carthage were roused by a sense of 
rapidly approaching danger, by the excitement of war, by that 
pure love of home and land which God has implanted in every 
breast. The women of Israel were under no excitement; nay, 
they were wandering in a wilderness fraught with much to 
exhaust and weary mere human nature , however the immortal 
spirit might be sustained by the presence and revelation of the 
Lord. Their goal was in perspective. The voice of murmuring, 
of disbelief, was constantly sounding around them. “ Wherefore 
is it, that thou hast brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and 
our children ?” were words, not once nor twice, but countless 
times repeated, with every new trial of their faith. And what 
is so infectious in a “ mixed multitude” as unbelief — ay, even in 
the very face of miracles performed in their behalf? Yet, at the 
.first call, thsre were still very many wise and willing-hearted to 
come fo.ward. The women of Carthage were actuated by the 
mere feelings, of humanity, by palpable danger, by the clearly 
traced issue of their efforts. The women of Israel worked 
through faith. Hoping for no earthly reward, seeking no 
worldly glory, sacrificing ornaments most prized (for dress, as 
we shall presently see, was considered rather too much than too 
little by our ancestors), knowing that once given they could not 
be recalled, keeping neither time nor talent back, but using both 
perseveringly and indiscriminately, and all simply and solely out 
of pure love to God. 

There is something both beautiful and consoling in this por* 
tion of our history. It informs us, that in the very midst of 


214 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


constant rebellions and constant fallings away, there were, and 
will always be found, many to love and serve their God. That 
He will never leave Himself without witnesses upon earth ; and 
that, therefore, however we may mourn the lack of energy and 
spirituality in Israel — however we may grieve and deplore the 
cases of infidelity or indifference, or even direct departures from 
His most Holy Law — still God is with us to retain many an 
unsuspected one in fidelity and zeal. Despondency, even in Hi9 
cause, is more than wrong ; it is sinful, for it doubts Him who 
is so strong to save ; whose word is passed, that “ Israel shall 
never cease to be a nation before Him and who, even fron 
the deepest darkness, can and will bring forth light. It causes 
feelings towards our fellows, both of injustice and pain ; and in 
ourselves deadens every effort after holiness and righteousness, 
by the supposition, that the struggles of one individual must be 
all in vain. Despondency treads so closely upon indifference, 
that every effort should be put in force to prevent its ascendency. 
We cannot have faith either in God or man if we despond, and 
thus we are gradually led into sin, alike against our Father in 
Heaven, our brother man, and ourselves. 

To us as women, the particular mention of our female ances- 
tors, as bringing offerings and working for the tabernacle, is 
inexpressibly consoling. It assures us that, lowly as we are, 
retired as is our natural sphere, incapable as is our weaker 
frame for the exertions of man in the Lord’s service, still 
we are acceptable — still He will graciously look down on our 
“ willing hearts,” and the humble work of our hand, and bless 
them with such love, as will give us peace even upon earth. It 
tells us, that from Him comes every employment and resource, 
alike of mind and hand ; and that, in consequence, all should 
be used to His glory ; not, indeed, for the service of the taber- 
nacle, for we are not now so called upon to w 7 ork, but in the 
happiness which His gifts should bestow upon ourselves and 
our fellow-creatures. Had we but these two chapters in our 
Holy Law, we should have sufficient to confirm our spiritual 
privileges ; — that our Father asks but a willing spirit, a heart 
that is stirred within us to do His service, whatever it may be, 
to resign whatever He may call ; but it must be a willing 
heart : mere lip-service is mockery and sin. Let it not be said 
that the Jewish religion is a religion of mere form, incumbent 
only on the males, and therefore debarring woman from all 


PERIOD III. CALEB S DAUGHTER. 215 


religious exercises, all access to God. Bid those who throw 
Ruch foul wrong on Israel, come hither to the pure unadulterated 
fount of the Living God, and then say, if the religion of the 
Nazarene were the first, and only one , to teach woman her 
holy privileges, and to preach that pure spiritual piety of the 
heart, that simple working through faith, which is revealed so 
olessedly in our Law, and confirmed by every inspired prophet 
of the Lord. And that religion of the heart is ours still. We 
need no other to replace it. 

The age of chivalry is generady supposed to be a powerful 
proof of the respect and consideration with which women were 
regarded amongst the Gentile nations during the middle ages. 
Their position was marked ; their love, their hand, the greatest 
reward, the most powerful incentive for the young warriors to 
distinguish themselves. Marvellous deeds were done, and dan- 
gers dared, all for the smiles of woman ; nay, evil passions 
were often subdued : generosity, magnanimity, kindness, and 
many other virtues, were called into play by woman’s influence, 
without which those ages would have been dark indeed. Her 
individual position might have been too elevated ; but still, that 
elevation w r as far more often used for good than evil. Chivalry 
did bring forth good with regard to woman’s influence on man, 
and no one assuredly will deny, but that to have been held up 
as the rewarder of valor, the incentive of virtue, must have 
made her a subject of consideration, respect, and love, very 
different to slavery and degradation. 

Now, the very first instance of chivalry which history records, is 
found in the Bible, and in the history of that very people to whose 
women similar privileges are denied. “And Caleb said, he 
that smiteth Kirjath-sepher [also called Debir], and taketh it, 
to him will I give Achsah my daughter to wife. And Othniel, 
the son of Kenaz, Caleb’s younger brother, took it: and he 
gave him Achsah his daughter to wife. And it came to pass, 
as she came unto him, she moved him to ask of her father a 
field ; and she lighted off her ass ; and Caleb said unto her, 
vVliat wouldst thou ? and she said unto him, Give me a bless- 
ing ; for thou hast given me a south land ; give me also springs 
of water. And Caleb gave her also the upper springs and the 
nether springs.” We find all these verses, first in Joshua xv. 
16-19, and repeated without any variation in Judges i. 12-15 


216 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


Caleb was a prince of the tribe of Judah (Numb. xiii. 6), sc 
high in favor with the Lord, as to be joined with Joshua in 
being permitted to enter the promised land, and designated by 
the Eternal as “ My servant Caleb, who hath followed me 
fully.” 

Caleb seems to have been, like Joshua, a prince and warrior 
of high repute, dauntless, and faithful before God and before 
man. His daughter (though not an only child, for we read in 
1 Chron. iv. 15, that he had also three sons) shared the con- 
sideration proffered to her father. Caleb must have seen the 
high respect and admiration in which she was held, or he 
never would have dreamed of offering her as the reward of 
valor. That wiiich is of no value, lightly won, and lightly 
held, and, when obtained, to sink merely into a household 
slave, was not at all likely to excite young men to the arduous 
task of smiting and taking a fortified city, defended as it was 
by the sons of Anak, whose immense stature and extraordinary 
prowess had formerly caused them to be considered as “giants,” 
in whose sight the children of Israel were but as “ grass- 
hoppers.” Nor can we regard this as merely a solitary instance : 
it is a proof of the general condition of Hebrew women at that 
period ; and also that Othniel was not Achsah’s only admirer. 

“ He that smiteth and taketh it, to him will I give Achsah 
my daughter to wife,” is a general appeal, supposing her hand 
to be a sufficient incentive to all the young men of the tribe ; 
and that His Law, regarding the inheritance of daughters, 
should not be transgressed, the Eternal blessed the valiant 
efforts of Othniel, Caleb’s own nephew, with success ; and the 
coveted maiden became his wife. 

That it was solely Achsah herself who was sought and won, 
with no idea of her wealth, is clearly proved by the simple 
words “ she moved him [her husband] to ask of her father, a 
field or piece of land ;” the wish for possession came from her, 
not from Othniel, who was in all probability fully satisfied with 
the recompense he had gained ; and when Caleb had granted 
this request, as we know by the words in which she afterwards 
addresses him, she approached him herself, and lighting off hei 
ass, a token of the respect natural to Israel, Caleb asked her; 
“ What wilt thou ?” and she answered him, “ Give me a bless- 
ing ;” meaning, possibly, a further token of his love for her - 


period hi. — Caleb’s daughter. 217 

u for thou hast given me a south land [alluding to that already 
given at Othniel’s request], give me also springs of water : and 
Caleb gave her the upper and the nether springs.” 

Without springs, land, in so hot a country as Judea, was of 
little value ; and therefore is it that Achsah craves this boon in 
addition to that already granted. The affectionate confidence 
subsisting between the father and daughter is beautifully illus- 
trated in this simple little incident. Though Achsah held her 
father in such respect as not to prefer her request while sitting 
on her ass before him, yet she feared not to make her wishes 
known, fully conscious that, were they in his power, he would 
grant them unhesitatingly ; and his instant reply proves how 
much reason she had for her confidence. 

We learn too from this, that woman must undoubtedly have 
had the power of possessing landed property in her own right, 
and in a degree exclusive of her husband ;* else Caleb would 
have made over the portion intended for her to Othniel on his 
marriage, instead of waiting for Achsah to ask, and granting it 
to her alone. 

The beautiful law of our God was then in full force among 
every rank and condition of man ; and surely we can find no 
trace in the history of Achsah to confirm the false position of 
our being degraded. Does it not rather elevate us to a perfect 
equality with our brother man, and prove undeniably that the 
Israelites were the very first nation in the world to hold forth 
the love and hand of woman as the pure and holy incentive to 
deeds of manline is and valor? 

* And exclusive also of her brothers ; for if landed inheritance were 
to be man’s only, she could have had no claim to any portion. The above 
was written originally, under the impression that Achsah was Caleb’s 
only child : a further study of the genealogies in Chronicles proves that 
alio was cot. 


218 


The WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


CHAPTER III. 

DEBORAH. 

The promised land was gained, deeds of extraoi dinary vaioi 
and military skill and prowess marked its conquest and subdi- 
vision ; but God’s express command was disobeyed ; and, in 
consequence, the tribes, even after they hsd settled in their 
respective territories, were continually “ doing evil in the sight 
of the Lord,” and at war, as a chastisement, with their idola- 
trous neighbors. God had ordained the extermination of the 
former inhabitants of Palestine, because of their fearful state of 
idolatry, and various abominations. He had deferred bringing 
in the seed of Abraham to their appointed land, because “ the 
iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full.” He might in His 
wisdom have exterminated them by fire, water, or disease ; but 
lie appointed the swords of the Israelites as the instruments of 
His wrath, simply to try their faith and obedience, and bid 
them earn the rest, peace, spiritual and temporal glory, which 
he had held forth as the recompense of perfect obedience. 

This fact is very frequently disregarded in a mere superficial 
reading of the history of Canaan. There are those even to 
doubt and cavil at the ways of their God, because He com- 
manded His people to obtain possession of the promised land 
at the edge of the sword ; forgetting that so doing was at once 
a punishment for those who had insulted Him by their awful 
iniquities (having full power to subdue sin, and keep in the 
straight path, as did the inhabitants of Mesopotamia even with- 
out direct reve.ation), and also to try the obedience of His 
people. Disease, fire, or flood, would have accomplished the 
first of these designs equally with the plan adopted ; but not 
the second. Yet the former would at once have been recognised 
as the hand of God ; no one questioning the agency of either the 
deluge, the destruction of Sodom, or the earthquake and the 
plague, punishing the rebellion of Korah. Why then should 
not the sword of slaughter be traced to the same Divine ordina 
tion, whence alone in fact it proceede I ? 


PERIOD III. — DEBORAH. 


219 


The Israelites, however, failed in their commanded obedience. 
Instead of exterminating, they entered into friendly leagues with 
the enemies and insulters of their God ; and the Eternal, in His 
just anger, permitted them, in consequence, to remain as 
thorns, and pricks in their sides, and their false gods as a snare 
unto them.” And so it was: “ They took their daughters to 
oe their wives, and gave their daughters to their sons, and 
served their gods ; and the children of Israel did evil in the 
sight of God, and forgat the Lord their God, and served Baalim 
and the groves.” And this fearful state of things occurred 
repeatedly ; rousing the anger of the Lord each time to sell 
them into the hands of their enemies, and yet whenever they 
cried unto Him in returning faith and repentance, His infinite 
mercy raised up deliverers in whom He put His spirit, and 
saved them. 

Othniel, the nephew and son-in-law of Caleb, Ehud, and 
Shamgar, had each in his turn been thus selected by the Lord ; 
and during their respective sways Israel was at rest and obedi- 
ent. But between each, they had relapsed into idolatry and 
rebellion ; and after the deaths of Ehud and Shamgar, who 
appear contemporaries, falling anew into evil, the Eternal sold 
them into the hands of Jabin, king of Hazor, who mightily 
oppressed them twenty years, and caused them again to cry unto 
the Lord. 

But even in these periods of anarchy and rebellion, all were 
not idolatrous. There must still have been many “ seven 
thousands who had not bowed the knee to Baal,” else would 
net the Lord have thus repeatedly compassionated and relieved 
them. Amongst these faithful few, the law was of course 
followed, and the people judged according to the statutes given 
through Moses. Had there been the very least foundation for 
the supposition of the degrading and heathenizing the Hebrew 
female, we should not find the offices of prophet, judge, military 
instructor, poet, and sacred singer, all combined and all perfected 
in the person of a woman ; a fact clearly and almost startlingly 
illustrative of what must have been their high and intellectual 
tiaining, as well as natural aptitude for guiding and enforcing 
the statutes of their God, to which at that time woman could 
attain. 

“And Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth, she 
judged Israel at that time. And she dwelt under the palm 

10 


220 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


tree of Deborah, between Ramah and Bethel, in Mount 
Ephraim : and the children of Israel came unto her for judg- 
ment.” This simple description evinces that the greatness of 
Deborah consisted not at all in outward state, in semblance of high 
rank, or in any particular respect or homage outwardly paid 
her; but simply in her vast superiority of mental and spiritual 
acquirements which were acknowledged by her countrymen, 
and consequently revered. The office of judge in Israel was not 
hereditary. It only devolved on those gifted to perform it . 
and, by the example before us, might be held by either sex: 
rather an unsatisfactory proof of the degradation of Jewish 
women. "We are expressly told that Deborah was a prophetess, 
and “ the wife of Lapidoth ” Now, by the arrangement of this 
sentence, confirmed by the context, it is very evident that 
Deborah was a prophetess in her own person, wholly and 
entirely distinct from her husband, who was a mere cypher in 
public concerns. The Eternal had inspired her, a woman and 
a wife in Israel, with His spirit expressly to do His will, and 
make manifest to her countrymen how little is He the respecter 
of persons ; judging only by hearts perfect in His service, and 
spirits willing for the work : heeding neither the weakness nor 
apparent inability of one sex, compared with the greater natural 
powers of the other. 

Yet so naturally are her public position and personal gifts 
described, that we cannot possibly believe her elevation to be 
an extraordinary occurrence, or that her position as a wife for- 
bade her rising above mere conjugal and household duties. 
We never hear of a slave, or leper, or heathen, being intrusteu 
with the prophetic spirit of the Eternal, simply because the 
social condition of such persons would and must prevent their 
obtaining either the respect, obedience, or even attention of the 
people. For the same reason, had woman really been on a 
par with these, as she is by some declared to be, she . would 
never have been intrusted with gifts spiritual and mental, 
which Deborah so richly possessed. She never could have been 
a prophetess, for her words would only have been regarded as 
idle raving. She could never have been a judge, from the want 
of opportunities to train and perfect her intellect, and to obtain 
the necessary experience. Now it is clear that instead of this, 
her natural position must have been so high, that there needed, 
not even adventitious state and splendor to make it acknow 


PERIOD III. DEBORAH. 


221 


iedged ; and her intellect and judgment so cultivated, as not 
only to bring the people flocking to her for judgment, but to 
occasion Barak’s refusal to set out on a warlike expedition 
unless she accompanied them. 

We find the first recorded instance of her using her pro- 
phetic power in Judges iv. 6 : “And she sent and called Barak 
the son of Abinoam out of Kedesh Naphtali, and said unto 
him, Hath not the Lord God of Israel commanded, saying, Go 
and draw toward Mount Tabor, and take with thee ten thou- 
sand men of the children of Naphtali and the children of 
Zebulun ? And I will draw unto thee Sisera, the captain of 
Jabin’s army, and his chariots and his multitudes ; and 1 will 
deliver him into thine hand. And Barak said unto her, If 
thou wilt go with me, then I will go : but if thou wilt not go 
with me, then will I not go. And she said, I will surely go 
with thee : notwithstanding the journey shall not be for thine 
honor ; for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a 
woman.” 

We should be at a loss to understand the feeling in Barak, 
which impelled his reply, might we not infer it from Deborah’s 
rejoinder. It would appear that, like many of his countrymen, 
while he obeyed, he was still wanting in the perfect faith which 
would have given him a glorious triumph in his own person. 
The presence of Deborah could in no way give him greater 
increase of safety and glory, than had he gone without her. 
She was but the instrument of the Lord, making His will 
known to her fellows. The words were not hers, but God’s ; 
and Barak should have acted on them without either reserva- 
tion or doubt. Instead of which we find him making a condi- 
tion to his obedience ; and refusing to obey, if that condition 
were not complbd with. What could the presence of a woman 
avail him ? Her being a prophetess gave him no more assur- 
ance of conquest than the word of the Lord had already done ; 
and because he trusted more in the woman than in her God , the 
journey would not be to his honor ; a woman's hand should 
accomplish that complete downfall of Sisera, which would other- 
wise have accrued to his individual glory. It is evident that 
this is the real rendering of this rather obscure sentence, else 
we should not have it so expressly stated that the “journey 
would not be for his honor.” 

Deborah however arose, and wont with Barak, first to collect 


222 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


the necessary troops from Zebulun and Naphtali, and then to 
Mount Tabor, where Sisera and his immense armament of nina 
hundred chariots of iron, besides infantry, marched to meet 
them. Still we find Barak but secondary, doing nothing with- 
out the word of the Lord through Debotah. And Deborah 
said, “ Up ! for this is the day in which the Lord hath delivered 
Sisera into thine hand : is not the Lord gone out before thee ? 
So Barak went down from Mount Tabor, and ten thousand 
men after them and the Lord gave them such complete 
victory, that but Sisera escaped, to receive his death at the hand 
of a woman, according to the Eternal’s word. Nor was it 
a single victory, for “ the hand of the children of Israel pros- 
pered and prevailed against Jabin, king of Canaan.” 

We next find Deborah exercising that glorious talent of 
extempore poetry only found amongst the Hebrews ; and by 
her, a woman and a wife in Israel, possessed to an almost equal 
degree with the Psalmist and prophets, who followed at a later 
period. Her song is considered one of the most beautiful speci- 
mens of Hebrew poetry, whether read in the original, or in the 
English version. We find her taking no glory whatever to 
herself, but calling upon the princes, and governors, and people 
of Israel, to join with her in “ blessing the Lord for the aveng- 
ing of Israel.” In the fourth and fifth verses, she alludes, by a 
most beautiful figure, to the power of the Eternal. That before 
Him “the earth trembled, and the heavens dropped, and the 
clouds dropped water. And the mountains trembled, even 
Sinai, before the Lord God of Israel,” thus manifesting that his 
power, not man’s, had brought delivery to Israel. Then in the 
sixth and eighth verses she describes the condition of the people 
before she arose a mother in Israel ; that they were compelled 
to travel in by-paths, because of the high roads all being occu- 
pied by their foes ; and from the villages all the inhabitants 
had ceased, from their being continually exposed undefended 
to the enemy. Nor was there a shield or spear seen in the 
forty thousand of Israel. The simplicity and lowliness of the 
prophetess’s natural position, is beautifully illustrated by the 
term she applies to herself — neither princess, nor governor, nor 
judge, nor prophetess, though both the last offices she fulfilled 
— “ until that I, Deborah, arose, until I arose a mother in 
Israel.” She asked no greater honor or privilege for herseU 
individually, than the being recognised as the mother ot ttie 


PERIOD III. DEBORAH. 


223 


people whom the Lord alone had endowed her with power to 
judge. “ My heart is towards the governors of Israel,” she 
continues, “ that offered themselves willingly among the people. 
Bless ye the Lord,” meaning those who, rising from the idolatry 
and sloth which had encompassed the people, offered themselves 
willingly for the service of the Lord. She bids them speak, — 
all classes of people, — from those princes who rode on white 
asses, and those who sat in judgment, and those who walked 
by the way, to even the drawers of water who had before been 
harassed by the noise of the archers coming forcibly to disturb 
their domestic employments ; and all were to rehearse the 
righteous acts of the Lord, for to Him alone they owed their 
preservation. “The Lord made me have dominion over the 
mighty,” she says, in verse thirteen, thus retaining her own 
dignity and power in Israel, yet tracing it to the Eternal, not to 
herself. The poetry describing the downfall of their foes, call- 
ing forth the imagery of nature to give it force and life ; the 
death of Sisera, and the waiting and watching of his mother at 
her lattice — “ Why is his chariot so long in coming ? why 
tarry the wheels of his chariots ?” and the answer, alike from 
her ladies, and her own heart, “ Have they not sped ? have 
they not divided the prey ; to every man a damsel or two ; to 
Sisera a prey of divers colors, a prey of divers colors of needle- 
work, meet for the necks of them that take the spoil ?” as if to 
fail with his mighty armament were impossible ; and thus sung 
by the lips of the conquerors, infused with a species of satire, 
giving indescribable poignancy to the strain ; and then the 
glorious conclusion, “ So let all thine enemies perish, 0 Lord : 
but let them that love thee be as the sun when he goeth forth 
in his might ;” form altogether one of the sublimest strains of 
spiritual fervor in the Bible ; and mark forcibly, by her conduct, 
both as prophetess and judge, that in Deborah, even as in 
Gideon, David, and the prophets of later years, God disdained 
not to breathe His spirit, but made a woman His instrument to 
judge, to prophesy, to teach, and to redeem. 

“ And the land had rest forty years,” w r e are told at the con* 
elusion of Deborah’s song ; words which, as no other judge is 
mentioned, would lead us to infer that Deborah continued 
“a mother in Israel” all that time, retaining the people in 
fidelity, and consequently in temporal and spiritual peace. 
Even if she did not live herself to govern all those years, it is 


224 


THE WOMEN OP ISRAEL. 


evident that her influence and instructions were remembered 
and acted upon, for it was not till after these forty years that 
“ Israel again did e^il in the sight of the Lord,” and so again 
required a redeemer, which was granted in the person of 
Gideon. 

The silence preserved regarding the subsequent life and 
death of Deborah, is a simple confirmation of the meekness and 
humility with which we found her judging Israel under her 
own palm-tree, before being called to a more stirring scene. 
The land was at peace, the power of prophecy and foresight in 
military matters was no longer needed, and Deborah resumed 
her personally humble station, evidently without any ambitious 
vish, or attempt to elevate her rank or prospects. It was 
enough that she was useful to her countrymen ; that she was a 
lowly instrument in the Eternal’s hand to work them good. 
What, now, did she need to satisfy the woman nature , which 
she still so evidently retained ? Her judgments, her works, are 
covered with the veil of silence, but we learn their effects by 
the simple phrase, that “ the land had rest forty years” — the 
land, the whole land, not merely that which was under her 
direct superintendence. Virtue, holiness, and wisdom, though 
the gifts of but one lowly individual, are not confined to one 
place, when used, as were Deborah’s, to the glory of God, and 
the good of her people. Silently, and perhaps unperceived, 
they spread over space and time ; and oh ! how glorious must 
be the destiny of that woman, who, without one moment quit- 
ting her natural sphere, can yet by precept, example, and labor 
produce such blessed effects as to give the land peace, and 
bring a whole people unto God ! 

In a practical view, perhaps, the character of Deborah cannot 
now be brought home to the conduct of her descendants, for 
woman can no longer occupy a position of such trust and wisdom 
in Israel ; but, theoretically, we may take the history of Debo- 
rah to our hearts, both nationally and individually. With such 
an example in the Word of our God, it is unanswerably evident 
that neither the Written nor the Oral Law could have contained 
one syllable to the disparagement of woman. 

Men were in no condition to have permitted the influence of 
woman, had they not been accustomed, by the constant and 
emphatic enjoinments of the law, to look on her with respect, 
consideration, and tenderness. Mentally and spiritually, Debo- 


PERIOD III.- -D E B O R A H . 


225 


mh was gifted in an extraordinary degree, leading us to infer 
that the women of Israel must have had the power to cultivate 
both mind and spirit, and to delight in their resources, for we 
have the whole Bible to prove that the Eternal never selected 
for the instruments of His will, any but those whose hearts were 
inclined towards Him, even before He called them — witness the 
history of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David, and others. All and 
every talent comes from God, but will not work and influence 
ly His sole gift alone. They are given to be improved, persever- 
ed in, perfected, by those to whom they are intrusted, and then 
used in the service of their Giver. It is evident, then, that 
Deborah had the inclination and the power to cultivate, perfect, 
and use the gifts of her God ; and this would have been quite 
impossible, had her social condition been such as the enemies of 
s criptural and spiritual Judaism declare. With the history of 
Deborah in their hands, the young daughters of Israel need little 
other defence or argument, to convince their adversaries that 
they require no other creed, nor even a denial of the Oral Law, 
to teach them their proper position, alike to themselves and 
their fellows, and in their relative duties towards God and man. 

Deborah being a wife, confirms this yet more strongly. 
There must not only have been perfect freedom of position, but 
}f action ; even more than is found in the history of any modern 
nation, for we do not find a single instance of a wife being elect- 
ed to any public office requiring intellect and spirituality, 
secular and religious knowledge, so completely distinct from her 
husband. Yet the history of Deborah in no way infers that she 
was neglectful of her conjugal and domestic duties. There is an 
unpretending simplicity about her very greatness. The very 
fact of those she judged coming to her under her own palm- 
tree, supposes her quiet and retired mode of living. She never 
leaves her home, except at the earnest entreaty of Barak, which 
urges her to sacrifice domestic retirement for public good. To 
a really great mind, domestic and public duties are so perfectly 
compatible, that the first need never be sacrificed for the last. 
And that Lapidoth in no manner interfered with the public 
offices of his wife, called as she was to them by God Himself 
through His gifts, infers a noble confidence and respectful con- 
sideration towards her, evidently springing at once from the 
national equality and freedom tendered to Jewish women ; and 
from a mind great enough to appreciate and value such talents 


226 


THE WOMEN OF 


S R A E L . 


even in a woman ; a greatness not very often found in modern 
times. 

To follow in the steps of our great ancestress is not possible, 
now that the prophetic spirit is removed from Israel, and the few 
public offices left us fall naturally to the guardianship of man ; 
yet many and many a Jewish woman is intrusted with one or 
more talents direct from God ; and if she can stretch forth a 
helping hand to the less enlightened of her people, let her not 
hold back, from the false and unscriptural belief that woman 
cannot aid the cause of God, or in any way attain to religious- 
knowledge. His word is open to her, as to man. In Hoses’ 
command to read and explain the Law to all people, woman was 
included by name. And now the whole Bible, Law, Historical 
books, Psalms, and Prophets, are open to her daily commune, 
and shall it be said that she has neither the right nor the under- 
standing to make use of such blessed privilege ? Shame, shame 
on those who would thus cramp the power of the Lord, in deny- 
ing to any one of His creatures the power of addressing and 
comprehending Him, through the inexhaustible treasure of His 
gracious word ! 

Every married woman is judge and guardian of her own 
household. She may have to encounter the prejudices of a 
husband, not yet thinking with her on - all points; but if she 
have really a great mind, she will know how to influence, with- 
out in any way interfering. She will know how to serve the Lord 
in her household without neglecting her duty and affection 
towards her husband ; and by domestic conduct influence 
society at large, secretly and unsuspectedly indeed, but move 
powerfully than she herself can in the least degree suppose. 

To unmarried women, even as to wives, some talent is intrust- 
ed, which may be used to the glory of its Giver. Life is -not 
lent us to be frittered away in an unmeaning little satisfactory 
run of amusements, or often in their mere fruitless search. 
There surely is some period in a single woman’s existence, when 
the hopes, ambition, and even favorite amusements, of girlhood 
must come to an end. Because unmarried, is woman still to 
believe herself a girl, hoping for, and looking for, a change in 
her existence, which will in reality never come ? Would it not 
be wiser and better, aye, and incalculably happier, if woman her- 
self withdrew from the sphere of exciting hopes and pleasures 
which she had occupied in girlhood ? If she sought persever 


i'ERIOL III. WIFE OF MANOAH. 


227 


lugly and prayerfully some new objects of interest, affection, and 
employment, which she might justly hope would become a stay 
and support in rapidly advancing years, and thus entirely pre- 
vent the ennui, and its attendants, love of gossip, frivolity, and 
often sourness and irritability, which are too generally believed 
to be the sole characteristics of single (and so of course suppos- 
ed disappointed) women ? Have we not all some precious 
talent lent us by our God, and for the use of which He will 
demand an account ? Is there not the whole human family 
from which to select some few objects of interest, on whom to 
expend some of our leisure time, and draw our thoughts from 
all-engrossing self? Were there but one object on whom we 
have lavished kindness, and taught to look up to God and hea- 
ven, and to walk this earth virtuously and meekly — but one or 
two whom, had we the pecuniary means, we have clothed and 
fed — a sick or dying bed that we have soothed — a sorrowing 
one consoled — an erring one turned from the guilty path — the 
repentant, or the weak, strengthened and encouraged — we shall 
not have lived in vain ; or, when we come to die, look shudderingly 
back on a useless life and wasted gifts ; on existence lost in the 
vain struggle to arrest the flight of time, and still seek hope and 
pleasure in thoughts and scenes, whose sweetness has been too 
long extracted for aught to remain but bitterness and gall. 
Deborahs in truth we cannot be ; but each and all have talents 
given, and a sphere assigned them, and, like her, all have it in 
their power, in the good performed towards man, to use the one, 
and consecrate tl e other to the service of their God. 


CHAPTER IV. 

’VIFE OF M A N O A 11. 

Several years passed since the death of Deborah. Gideon, 
Tolo, Jair, Jepthah, Ibzan, Elon, and Abdan, had successively 
judged Israel, often with interregnums of rebellion, apostasy* 


228 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


and anarchy. After the death of the last mentioned judge, 
“the children of Israel again did evil in the sight of the Lord, 
and He, delivered them into the hands of the Philistines forty 
years.” We now come to another incident in the history of the 
women of Israel demanding our attention. In the tribe of Dan 
was a certain man of the city of Zorah, named Manoah, whose 
wife had no children, always a source of grief in the families of 
Israel ; not , as the Christians believe, from the idea of becoming 
the mother of the promised Messiah (who is scarcely mentioned 
till the time of the prophets, when the awfully threatened chas- 
tisement of the Eternal needed such condolatory promises), but 
because children were always considered proofs of the Lord’s 
love, a privilege granted from Him as the recompense of faith- 
ful service ; as we read in the words of David, “ Lo, children 
are an heritage of the Lord : and the fruit of the womb is His 
reward,” Psalm cxxvii. And, again, “ Thy wife shall be as a 
fruitful vine by the sides of thine house : and thy children like 
olive plants around thy table. Behold, thus shall the man be 
blessed that feareth the Lord. Thou shalt see thy children’s 
children, and peace on Israel,” Psalm cxxviii. To go down 
childless to the grave, and so prevent the name from being 
“ built up” in Israel, was deemed a heavy afflictic a, inferring, for 
some secret sin or public transgression, the anger of the Lord. 

Sacred Writ is silent as to the reason of the Eternal’s selec- 
tion falling: on the family of Manoah for a deliverer in part from 
the Philistines, but we are justified in inferring from the con- 
texf ', that they were one of the few faithful followers of Israel, 
by whom the Law was in all points obeyed. Be that however 
as it may, this is certain, that it was to the woman, not to the 
man, the Most High deigned to send His angelic messenger, 
with not only the blessed revelation that He would grant her a 
son ; but deigning to instruct her as to the food and drink she 
was to refrain from taking herself, and to the devoting her babe 
as a Nazar ite to the Lord, even from his infancy ; thus making 
the direct commands of the Immutable agree in all points with 
th^ Law which His wisdom and mercy had already given. 

Naturally astonished, for such revelations were not even then 
common in Israel, we find “the woman” following the impulse 
of her confiding nature, hastening on the instant to her hus- 
band, and informing him that a man of God had come unto her, 
and his countenance was very terrible (signifying, not actually 


PERIOD III.-— WIFE OP MANOAH. 229 

terrible, but grand and imposing), like the countenance of an 
angel of the Lord ; but “ I asked him not whence he was, nei- 
ther told he me his name.” From this description of the 
heavenly messenger, it appears that the woman did not consider 
him in reality an angel, supposing him a man of God or prophet, 
bearing a message from the Most High, as was usual in Israel, 
yet still struck by the imposing beauty of his countenance, and 
feeling it possessed something beyond mortality. 

Equally astonished, but believing , Manoah lost no time in idle 
speculation, but betook himself instantly to prayer : thus con- 
firming our idea of his faithfulness and piety, and proving one 
grand and important national truth, that the Israelites needed 
no mediator whatever, be he man or angel, to bring up their 
prayers before God, and obtain His gracious reply. Here was 
Manoah, living on his own estates, in his own tribe, far removed 
from the priests of the Lord and the tabernacle, through the 
first of whom alone it is declared, by our opponents, that the 
prayers of Israel could be acceptably offered up. No priest 
near, of whom he could either ask or obtain counsel ; no wise 
man or judge, of whom he might demand advice or explanation. 
Yet the law was then in force all over Israel, and if it had been 
illegal and derogatory to the dignity of the Lord to address Him 
in prayer from any place, or at any time, we should have found 
Manoah hastening without a moment’s delay to the appointed spot, 
and offering sacrifices to obtain the mediation of the anointed 
priest, knowing that through him only he could obtain reply. 

Instead of which, we find him, without even pause or hesita- 
tion, believing the words of his wife so implicitly, as to offer up 
a prayer of such simple construction that it clearly proves how 
little the Most High regards mere formula in prayer, when 
springing, as did Manoah’s, from humility and faith. “ Then 
Manoah entreated the Lord, and said, O my Lord, let the man 
of God which thou didst send come again to us, and teach us 
what we shall do unto the child that shall be born.” Here is 
no doubt expressed as to the reality of the blessing proffered : 
“ The child that shall be born,” reveals how fully he believed in 
the promise ; but, as was natural to humanity, he entreated a 
confirmation of the instructions vouchsafed, not knowing how far 
the imagination and the fears of his wife might have tinctured 
aer relation. 

“And God hearkened to the voice of Manoah.” Did we 


230 


TIIE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


need any further incentive to “ entreat the Lord” in all things 
surely we have it here. Manoah had simply spoken the 
thoughts of his heart in words, which would be their natural 
vehicle of expression. He had prayed through the merits of 
neither dead nor living, man nor angel, but in lowly trusting 
faith, and God hearkened and answered. Again His messenger 
appeared unto the woman as she sat in the field, Manoah not 
being with her, and she ran to inform her husband, saying that 
the man had again appeared unto her, the same who had come 
previously ; and Manoah, no doubt in secret adoring tho 
Beneficent God who had thus deigned to answer his prayer, 
went with his wife, and demanded of the messenger, if he were 
indeed the man who had visited them before. And being 
answered in the affirmative, he besought a repetition of how to 
“ order the child and the angel condescended a full reply, 
reiterating all his previous instructions. Still believing him a 
man, as himself, only gifted with the spirit of the Lord, 
Manoah, with the hospitality peculiar to the Hebrew, besought 
him to remain until “ we shall have made ready a kid for thee.” 
And the angel of the Lord said unto Manoah, “ Though thou 
detain me, I will not eat of thy bread. And if thou wilt offer a 
burnt-offering thou must offer it unto the Lord ; for Manoah 
knew not that he was an angel of the Lord. And Manoah said, 
What is thy name ? that when thy sayings come to pass, we 
may do thee honor. And the angel of the Lord said unto him, 
Wherefore askest thou thus after my name, seeing it is secret ? 
So Manoah took a kid with a meat-offering, and offered it upon 
a rock unto the Lord. And it came to pass, when the flame 
went up toward heaven from off the altar, the angel of the Lord 
ascended in the flame of the altar, and Manoah and his wife 
looked on it, and fell with their faces to the ground. And the 
angel of the Lord did no more appear unto Manoah and his 
wife : then Manoah knew he was an angel of the Lord. And 
Manoah said, We shall surely die, for we have seen God [i. e. a 
messenger direct from God.] But his wife said unto him, If 
the Lord were pleased to kill us, He -would not have received a 
burnt-offering and a meat-offering at our hands, neither would 
He have showed us all these things, nor would as at this 
(second) time have told us such things as these.” (Judges xii.) 

We have quoted this chapter almost at length, because it 
contains so much which it is almost imperative for us to con 


PERIOD III. WIFE OF MANOAH. 


231 


*ider in a national point of view, before we can come to regard 
it in its bearings on our history as women. Any elucidation or 
defence of our national belief will not, we trust, be deemed out 
of place in a Jewish work, however little it may be pronounced 
to have to do with the main point of its subject. In an age 
when so much of controversy is going on, when even the inti- 
mate association, and often friendships, between Hebrew and 
Gentile may bring forward peculiar points of belief, to inquire 
their differences or varying modes of interpretation — it becomes 
imperatively necessary for the young Hebrew of either sex to be 
provided with such defence as will, at least, satisfy his own 
heart and conscience, and render him invulnerable to the 
peculiar expositions proffered to his attention, however little 
such defence may weigh with the hereditary prejudices of 
his opponents. There is a wide difference between an argu- 
ment seeking the conversion of another, and that merely 
defending our own belief in the same sacred authority as 
gives a supposed foundation for the belief of an opponent. 
As long f*s the Christian confines his arguments and quotations 
to the New Testament, the Israelite feels perfectly secure, from 
his entire rejection of such authority as Divine. But when the 
words of the Old Testament are so explained as to bear almost 
startlingly upon the creed of our adversaries, then it is we need 
careful, though perfectly simple, training, to provide us both 
with reply and defence. To be kept in ignorance of the Naza- 
rene readings of the Bible does no good whatever ; for there are 
very few who can hope to pass through life, particularly now 
that social intercourse is so unrestrained, without some approach 
to the differences of belief, and their causes. Much better is it 
to know clearly the danger we are not unlikely to encounter, 
and how to avert it, than to come upon it wholly unprepared. 
Not in childhood indeed, for it would be folly to perplex the 
young mind with the tenets of two beliefs : then it is simply 
necessary to impress and explain the essentials of their own 
creed ; but in maturer years, when the opening mind is not only 
capable of understanding, but feels itself restless and anxious for 
something more than the mere education of childhood : then let 
them compare their belief with that of others ; let them know 
what and why their opponents so believe, through the enlarged 
and liberal views of a spiritually Jewish instructor ; let the light 
of reason and revelation be their guide, and we shall find both 


£32 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


male and female of the Hebrew youth so confirmed in their owe 
blessed faith, as to live and die for it, yet eschewing all of 
iiliberality, uncharitableness, and scorn, towards those of other 
and less enlightened creeds. 

The chapter under consideration is one of those much regarded 
by the Nazarene, ana always brought forward in controversial 
discussion. From Manoah’s simple words, “We have seen 
God,” they believe, that wherever the “ angel of the Lord” is 
mentioned, it signifies the second person of the Godhead ; and 
that as He took visible form to our ancestors of old, so we might 
equally believe in His taking the form of Jesus to save the world. 

To a mere superficial thinker this argument might prove 
dangerous ; and we are therefore anxious to explain this chapter 
according to the Israelite’s belief. In the first place, we refuse 
to see in this messenger anything more than the Word of God 
declares, “ an angel of the Lord,” simply because the Eternal 
said unto Moses, in answer to his earnest entreaty, “ Show me 
thy glory, Thou canst not see my face : for there shall 
no man see me, and live.” And we therefore know, that no 
man has or ever can see His face, and live ; for God is a God 
of truth, and knows not the very shadow of a change. That 
which He has once said is immutable, unwavering, changeless 
as Himself. That there may be, even in the books of Moses, 
one or two verses seeming to contradict this assertion, as in 
Exodus xxiv., verses 10 and 11, and in verse 11 of chapter 
xxxiii., is of no importance, being either a wrong translation, or 
the mere manner of writing, to bring down the solemn appear- 
ance of the glory of God to the comprehension of the mixed 
multitude, and impossible to be weighed a single moment with 
the words of the Most High Himself. Would He declare the 
solemn truth in one part of His Holy Word, confirming it by 
every prophet, and in another part command His people, as a 
condition of their salvation, to believe on His appearing on 
earth, and conversing face to face with man, first as an angel, 
and then in human form ? The very words of Manoah confirm 
this belief, and prove it was entertained as strongly by the ancient 
as the modern Jews. The Nazarenes take only the last mem- 
ber of this sentence, forgetting the important fact, “ We shall 
surely die , if, indeed , we have seen God,” for such is the real 
meaning of his words, and that he did not die ; and the simple 
truth of his wife’s suggestion convinced him, no doubt, as il 


PERIOD III. WIFE OF M A NOAH. 


233 


convinces us, that it was not God whom he had seen, but one 
of those angelic messengers whom it sometimes pleased the 
Lord to employ to deliver His missions unto man. The nature 
of such beings it needs not now to inquire ; but the belief in the 
existence of angels is so twined with the belief in the Bible, 
that if we disbelieve the one, we must disbelieve the other. 
The very word derived from the Arabic ‘•j&b, to send , or 

employ, signifies merely a messenger, a legate, used indiscrimi- 
nately for one employed by a king as ambassador, or by the 
Lord as an angel, prophet, or priest; and sometimes also 
applied to whatever is sent by the Eternal to execute His will, 
even as winds and plagues. 

The grand and imposing aspect of the angelic countenance, 
as we have seen, struck Manoah’s wife ; but that neither she nor 
her husband supposed him anything more than a prophet or 
priest, is evident by their manner of addressing him, and their 
entreating him to tarry for refreshment. The angel’s reply is 
strong confirmation of what we have already stated concerning 
his real oflioe. To eat of their bread would be confirming their 
idea that he was but a man ; to accept their burnt-offering would 
be arrogating to himself what was due only to his Heavenly 
Master. “If thou offer a burnt-offering thou must offer it unto 
the Lord not to him, who, though of an angelic nature, was 
still nothing but a messenger. Still ignorant that he was an 
angel, Manoah asks his name, to do him honor ; and because he 
knew how liable were even believing Israelites to turn aside from 
the worship rf the immutable God to worship others , and jealous 
for the glory of his Master , the angel refused to tell his name, 
declaring it was secret — that when his words came to pass, 
Manoah or his wife might not have even a name to turn aside 
their thoughts from the one sole God ; still, to convince them 
he was not a mere mortal, but came direct from the Lord, he 
ascended, or disappeared, in the flame of the altar, as had been 
the sign of the divine acceptance of the offering, from the sacri- 
fice of Abel downwards. And it was knowing this, and recog- 
nising the immediate agency of the Most High, in thus sending 
one of His own messengers, that so overwhelmed Manoah and 
his wife with religious awe, as to cause them to fall with their 
faces to the ground, not daring to look even upon the semblance 
of His glory. 

A layman, and a lowly individual of his father’s tribe, it was 


234 


1 HE HOMES OF ISRAEL. 


not unnatural that Manoah should even be more awe-struck, 
than rejoiced, at the revelation so graciously vouchsafed ; and 
whilst the mistaken idea engrossed him, if, indeed, it ever did, 
that he had conversed with God, he could not do otherwise than 
fear instant death, for, like all his brethren, he knew the God of 
Israel was a God of truth ; and, therefore, if he had seen him, 
he must cease to live. The ready answer of his wife removed 
these groundless fears; and while it told him, that if it had 
pleased the Lord to kill them, He would not have accepted 
offerings at their hands, or so revealed His will, it must equally 
have convinced him, as a believer in the revelation of the Lord 
through Moses, that it was not God , but his messenger whom 
He had seen. 

Such is the simple rendering of this very simple chapter ; 
while the second commandment, and the words already quoted, 
“No man can see me, and live,” with the firm belief that God 
is truth, are all sufficient wherewith satisfactorily to explain, both 
to our own hearts and to those of our children, every verse that 
may seem to read slightly contradictory, and supply us with an 
impenetrable shield, against which the reasonings of our oppo- 
nents must fall blunted and harmless to the ground. 

Regarding this narrative in its bearings on our history as 
Women of Israel, it is confirmation strong of our always attested 
declaration, that neither Written nor Oral Law interfered with 
the perfect equality of man and wife. The chapter before us 
displays a simple and natural picture of conjugal confidence and 
equa/ity, and of the respective peculiarities of man and woman. 
It is impossible to read this chapter, without perceiving that 
Manoah’s wife was a perfectly free agent, only bound by the 
links of love and confidence which the marriage law enjoins. 
As the mother of the child selected to deliver Israel in part from 
the Philistines, she was even of more importance in the sight of 
God than her husband, a fact inferred from the angel appearing 
both times to her, and only addressing Manoah when addressed 
by him. W T e find, too, Manoah including her alike in all he 
said and did. “ Let us detain thee, until we have prepared a 
kid,” &c. In the religious observance of the burnt-offering, and 
in the lowly prostration acknowledging the divine power, 
Manoah and his wife are separately named, proving her perfect 
equality in all religious observances, and her right to partake of 
them. That the angel never again appeared either to Manoah 


PERIOD III. WIFE OF MANOAH. 23* 

)r his wife, is the proof to them that he was a messenger from 
the Lord. The words, “ we shall surely die,” included her in 
the penalty supposed to have been incurred, and mark the 
female as equally a responsible agent as the male. Still more 
clearly demonstrative that the Hebrew wife really occupied the 
free and equal position which the laws of God Himself assigned 
her, is the fact that it w T as her ready wit, and quickness of intel- 
lect, which reassured her husband. She had been awe-struck 
like himself, but yet, perfectly in accordance with woman’s 
nature, was the first to comprehend the real intention of the 
revelation. Man’s more solid nature and deeper thought, 
require time for mature judgment — woman’s quicker fancy, and 
often more easily excited feeling, give her the advantage in the 
rapidity of comprehension, and, very often, in the correctness of 
judgment, which man’s greater solidity strengthens and ma- 
tures. 

But that Manoah’s wife could thus comprehend, and thus 
correctly judge, implies a domestic and social position which 
not only permitted, but exercised these peculiar faculties. In an 
enslaved and degraded position, their possession was practically 
and theoretically impossible. 

We find, then, much even in this brief chapter to interest and 
instruct us, alike as Hebrew women, and as women taken 
generally. In the latter, we shall do well to reflect on the sim- 
ple trusting confidence of Manoah’s wife, seeming the more 
tender and deferential from the greater correctness of judgment 
manifested afterwards. And so it should always be. However 
woman may be naturally endowed with superior attainments, 
with, perhaps, even a greater share of strength and firmness, and 
a quicker aptitude for intellectual acquirements, still it is her 
bounden duty so to guide and use these gifts, that they shall 
never in any way jar upon the feelings of the one chosen as her 
husband ; and check mutual confidence and love by that assump- 
tion of superiority, even granted it exist, of all things most irri 
toting to man’s nature. It is woman’s province to influence , 
never to dictate ; to conceal, rather than assume superiority. 
She may find many and many an opportunity to use it for the 
good of her husband and children, as was the case with the wife 
of Manoah ; but never let her display it — never let her permit 
her husband to feel his inferiority — never let her withhold con- 
fidence, from the mistaken notbn that as her judgment is as 


Z36 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


good, if not better than his, she cannot need his advice or inter- 
ference— for if she does, she may rest assured that from that 
instant her influence is at an end for ever. 


CHAPTER V. 

NAOMI. 

We now come to a portion of our history as women of Israel, 
which, from the loveliness of female character that it displays, 
has in neither history nor romance been equalled. In the Bible 
it is termed the book of Ruth ; but as Ruth does not properly 
belong, by birth and ancestry, to the women of Israel, Naomi 
must be the subject of our consideration. With her history, 
however, Ruth is so entwined, that we cannot reflect on the one 
without also pausing on the touching beauty of the other. 

The country of Moab, situated in the north-east part of 
Arabia Petrsea, was separated from Judea by the desolate tract 
of the Dead Sea, and the river Arnon. It could not probably 
be said ever to have formed part of the land of Canaan ; but was 
one of those nations which the Eternal expressly commanded 
His people to spare : see Deut. ii. 9. 

The Dead Sea was also the boundary of the tribe of Judah ; 
and it is rather a remarkable fact, that Judah and Simeon are 
the only tribes of Israel who appear to have driven out all the 
previous Canaanitish possessors. Judah was the first appointed 
by the Most High to go up against the land ; and, accompanied 
by his brother Simeon, evinced not only more obedience but 
more valor and military skill. We do not read of them, as of 
Benjamin, Manasseh, Ephraim, Zebulun, Asher, Naphtali, and 
Dan, who, with scarcely any fighting, entered into peaceful cove- 
nants with the Canaanites, and permitted them to dwell with 
them even in their cities. Nor, in consequence, do we find 
recorded of the tribe of Judah those awful crimes and wilful 


PERIOD III. NAOMI. 


23'J 


'idolatries practised by his brethren. In the early part of 
Jewish history, Judah was undoubtedly the most faithful tribe, 
else had he not been the chosen branch, from which, in God’s 
own time, will spring our Restorer and Messiah. 

Elimelech was a man of this valiant tribe, and, in consequence 
of a severe famine which devastated Judea (the punishment, in 
all probability, of national sin), he removed his family, consist- 
ing of a wife and two sons, to the country of Moab, not far dis- 
tant from their native city, Bethlehem- Judah or Ephratah. 
Elimelech died in Moab, not very long after he sojourned there ; and 
his two sons, Chilion and Mahlon, took them wives of the women 
of Moab, and dwelled there about ten years. Such unions were 
contrary to the given Law of God ; and we may infer that, not- 
withstanding the virtue and attractions of those selected, the act 
itself as disobedience was displeasing in the sight of the Lord, 
from the early deaths, without leaving children, of Elimelech’s 
two sons. This, however, is a mere suggestion which may or 
may not be, and does not infer Divine displeasure against either 
Orpah or Ruth ; as those not under the Law were not bound by 
its instructions. 

During the lifetime of her husband and sons, we hear nothing 
of Naomi ; but it is by her conduct and sentiments in adversity, 
and the strong affection borne towards her by her daughters-in- 
law, that we may judge of her previous character. 

A faithful wife, an affectionate mother — gentle, meek, trusting 
— manifesting a simple, guileless piety in every relation, every 
circumstance of life ; such she must have been, or we should not 
find her in affliction the character which the Word of God 
displays. 

It is not always in prosperity that we discover the true graces 
of a spiritual character. The quiet, unostentatious discharge of 
domestic duty — the fond, unwavering affections of domestic life 
— these strike us n^t ; nay, we often pass them by, wondering 
at the simplicity and tame-spirited ness which can rest content in 
such unexciting scenes. But when adversity comes, and strength 
and piety is to an extraordinary degree displayed, then it is w r e 
learn that it is in unexciting scenes woman’s character is best 
matured ; and we may chance to envy those whom we had 
before almost despised. 

The heart of the Hebrew widow yearned towards that lo7elv 
land, from which she had been so long a willing exile for her 


238 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


husband aud children’s sake — yearned towards it, for it was the 
land of her brethren, where the Lord had set up His only 
Tabernacle ; where His law had assured her of His especial pro- 
tection — for she was a widow in Israel ; where her full heart 
could pour itself before Him in the congregation of her people 
— could worship Him in all points according to His law. In 
Moab she was alone of her race and faith. No wonder she 
yearned once more to rest in her native land; or that, lonely 
and aged as she was, she should yet set forth on the weary way, 
Another reason, also, might thus have urged her: she heard 
that “ the Lord had visited His people with bread,” and, there- 
fore, she was no longer guiltless in continuing to sojourn in a 
heathen land. 

Accompanied by her daughters, she departed from “ the place 
where she was but, after going some little way together, she 
tenderly besought them to return, each to ,aer mother’s house, 
praying that the Lord might deal kindly with them, even as they 
had dealt with the dead and with her ; and grant them each rest 
and peace, with a husband of their own people. Then she kissed 
them, and they lifted up their voices and wept, saying, “ We will 
surely return with thee unto thine own people.” They had 
lived with her ten years — a long period for the character and 
conduct to have been tried — and we see what Naomi’s must 
have been, by the grief of her two daughters — unable to part 
with her, even to return to their own parents. To Naomi, such 
separation must also have been a heavy trial ; but she was too 
unselfish to wish them to accompany her to a land of strangers. 
With renewed tenderness, then, she sought to turn them from 
their purpose, telling them she might no longer give them hus- 
bands ; thus alluding to the law of her people, which commands 
the brother or nearest kinsman of the deceased to take unto him- 
self the childless wife ; and then only do we hear this meek and 
pious mother in Israel revert to her heavy affliction. “ It griev- 
eth me much, for your sakes, that the hand of the Lord is gone 
out against me.” She recognised the hand of the Lord, and 
met her individual sorrows not only with uncomplaining resig- 
nation, but feeling yet more deeply for her daughters than for 
herself, and seeking to console them — leaving her own consola- 
tion to Him who had smitten and would heal. No w r onder that 
her fond words increased their grief and bade them weep again : 
but the effect on the sisters was different. Orpah was one of the 


PERIOD III. NAOMI. 239 

many, feeling painfully at the moment, passionately desirous to 
evince that she felt, but liable to be easily diverted from her pur* 
pose. Penetrating no deeper than the surface, she, perhaps, 
believed Naomi’s words as neither desiring nor requiring her 
further company ; and, therefore, repeatedly she kissed hei 
mother-in-law and wept, but at length turned back to her own 
home. Much as she loved the aged Naomi, earnestly as she 
wished to serve her, she had not sufficient firmness and steadi- 
ness of character to act of herself and set at naught the persua- 
sions of affection. Gentle and yielding, it was easier for her to 
grieve than to act ; and is not this the nature of many women ? 
They fear to abide by their, own judgment when two alternatives 
are presented to them. They hesitate and linger, fearing to 
commit themselves by decision, and so are guided by a breath. 
Accustomed to express all their own impulses and feelings with- 
out regarding others, such natures cannot possibly understand 
those firmer and less selfish ones, who would do violence to their 
own wishes, to secure what may seem the greater share of hap- 
piness for another. That Orpah was one of these, solves her 
conduct far more justly and agreeably than to suppose her, as 
many do, merely professing a love and regret which she could 
not really feel — else, she too would have followed Naomi. 
Orpah was woman in her weakness ; Ruth, woman in her 
strength ; and both are as beautifully true to woman’s nature 
now as then. 

Ruth’s owe unselfish character gave her the clue to her 
mother-in-law’s words. She could understand that Naomi 
might persuade them to return home, and yet cling to them as 
her last ties on earth. To Ruth action was better than passive 
grief, deeds than the tenderest words; and, therefore, when 
Naomi besought her to follow her sister-in-law, and return to 
her own people, Ruth’s sole answer was couched in words 
exquisitely illustrative of the deep tenderness, the firm devo- 
tion, the beautiful deference of her individual character : — 
“ Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following 
thee. Whither thou goest, I will go ; and where thou lodgest, 
i will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my 
God. Where thou diest, I will die, and there will I be buried 
The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part 
me and thee ! ” 

Not the most carefully studied oration could breathe more 


240 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


undying, changeless, self-submitting devotion, than these fe\* 
and simple words. Naomi was evidently poor. The riches of 
the Hebrews did not consist then of such wealth as would pro* 
vide for their families after their death ; land and its produce 
constituted their possessions ; and these, where there were no 
males to cultivate, could not prevent the female survivors from 
being poor as well as bereaved. Naomi’s return to her own 
land would, of course, according to the law of God, secure her 
provision ; but in the constant rebellion and disobedience of the 
people, it was precarious and uncertain — she might not even be 
recognised by her countrymen, so long a time had elapsed since 
she had left Ephratah. By her earnest entreaties for her 
daughters to return, it is evident that sufficiency and comfort 
marked their own homes. Yet Ruth unhesitatingly resigned 
them all to share her mother-in-law’s fate, whatever it might be. 
Bidding farewell to the friends, scenes, and associations of her 
youth, not for a time, but for a life, some cause for this pure 
devoted love there must have been. Ruth’s simple words not 
only reveal the beauty of her own character, but that of the 
aged Naomi. Affection is ever the impulse to devotion and 
unselfishness. The human heart ever needs something to which 
so to cling as to be drawn out from self, and Ruth was not 
a character to devote her affections and energies to an unworthy 
object. We know what the character of Naomi must have 
been in those ten or twelve years of which we hear nothing, 
by the simple devotedness of Ruth in her adversity. 

And what a comfort to that lone heart must have been the 
soothing words and “ steadfast mindedness ” of the Moabitish 
damsel. Must not she whom we shall find, under every circum- 
stance of joy or grief, looking to the Lord alone, and tracing 
all things from His Almighty hand, have felt this comfort cam** 
from him — and that even then she had not trusted in vain. 
In the midst of affliction He sent consolation ; in her deepest 
loneliness, raised up an earthly friend. Here, as we have 
already seen in the love of Isaac for Rebekah, we find the ten- 
der compassion of the Eternal for His creatures manifested in 
giving human comfort; He not only pours spiritual balm into 
the bleeding heart, but provides some being on whom its qui- 
vering affections may again find rest, and whose faithful love 
shall fill the aching void. To the bereaved wife and mother, 
left in her old age alone, a withered tree from which every leaf 


PERIOD III. NAOMI 


241 


and flower has gone, with no hope of ever bearing more, Ruth’s 
affection must have been indeed a precious balm. Without 
her, Naomi had been alone , and oh, at all times, how fearful is 
the suffering included in that word ! Yet more in the adver- 
sity of bereavement and old age ! 

We do not hear how long the travellers journeyed, but Holy 
Writ simply, yet forcibly, brings before us the wonder and sym- 
pathy excited by the Bethlehemites on Naomi’s return, “ and 
it came to pass, when they were come to Bethlehem, that all 
the city was moved about them, and they said, 4 Is this 
Naomi ? ’ ” Can we not fancy the whole city flocking to :ook 
upon the travellers, to discover if indeed the rumor of Naomi’s 
return could be correct — and anxious, if it were, to give her 
kindly welcome ? Struck by her look of years and sorrow, 
remembering her only as the fair and pleasant-looking wife of 
Elimelech, then in her freshest prime, marvelling one to another, 
can this indeed be Naomi ? It is a complete picture of that 
primitive union of family and tribe, peculiar to early Judaism. 
Men were not then so engrossed with self, as to feel no sympa- 
thy, no interest, out of their own confined circle. They could 
spare both time and feeling to “ be moved ” at the return of a 
country-woman, who had been absent so long ; and to grieve 
with her at those heavy afflictions which caused her to reply to 
their eager greetings, “ Call me not Naomi, call me Mara, for 
the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me ; I went out full, 
and the Lc?I hath brought me home again empty. Why then 
call ye me Naomi, seeing that the Lord hath testified against 
me, and the Almighty hath afflicted me ? ” 

Again we find Naomi in meek submission referring all the 
events of her life to her God, yet uttering no complaint ; she 
alludes to her heavy afflictions indeed, — alludes to them as 
afflictions , as God himself ordained — not as some enthusiasts 
would seek to persuade us, that all bereavements are to be con- 
sidered joys, and so received with thanksgiving and praise, that 
pain is not to be pain, if sent by the hand of the Lord. This is not 
the spirit of the Jewish religion, as taught and practised in the 
Bible. Our Father demands not such violence done to the 
heart which He hath so mercifully and so wisely stored with 
uich vast capabilities of pleasure and of pain. He demands 
not that sorrow is to be looked on as joy, and joy to be despised 
rs leading uc for from Him When He tries us in affliction, 


242 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


where would be its spiritual improvement in faith and submis- 
sion, if we are to welcome it as joy ? Where would be the 
trial of pain, if it be not pain ? No ! God loves us too well to 
forbid the healing and saving influence of that holy grief, 
which, without detaching us from the sweet and lovely links of 
earth that He Himself vouchsafed, will yet lead us to Him, 
convinced that He afflicts for our eternal good ; that He acts, 
even in bereavement, through His changeless love, and that He 
who smote, in His own time will heal. No sorrow has yet 
been soothed by the vain philosophy which would seek to 
lessen either its pang or its extent. The sufferer must weep 
and mourn awhile ; but if it be in the spirit of Naomi there 
will still be comfort found. 

Naomi makes no complaint ; but how deeply she feels th6 
contrast between her return to, and her departure from, Bethle- 
hem, we read in her shrinking from the name of her youth, 
which, signifying pleasantness, sweetness, and grace, too pain- 
fully recalled the days when those terms were applicable, not 
only to the charms of her personal character, but the pleasant- 
ness and sweetness of her daily life. Bitterness and sadness 
were more applicable to her present lot, than the sweetness and 
joyance which had characterized it heretofore ; and therefore 
she bids them call her Mara — but it is not complaint ; it is but 
the natural shrinking of humanity from the memory of the past, 
contrasted with the suffering of the present. 

It was at the beginning of the barley harvest Naomi and her 
daughter-in-law arrived at Bethlehem. There, it appears from 
the context, the former sought a retired and very humble dwell- 
ing. Notwithstanding that she had a wealthy kinsman, of the 
family of Elimelech, who, had she applied to him, was bound 
by the law to give her all the relief she needed, the gentle, 
unassuming nature of the widow preferred retirement and lowli- 
ness, to clair-ing the attention of her wealthy kinsman. The 
contrast between their respective positions was too great ; and 
how beautifully does this shrinking from making herself known 
to Boaz, or even from revealing his existence to Ruth, betray 
her gentle dignity ! — and that self-esteem, ever proceeding from 
true piety. The character of Naomi is consistent in all its parts, 
forcibly marking one who, from youth to age, was found true 
to herself and to her God. 

The holy narration tells us, that “ it was Ruth's hap to light 


PERIOD III. NAOMI. 


248 


on a part of the field belonging to Boaz.” Had she known his 
near connexion, her refinement and delicacy of feeling would 
have led her to any other field in preference. The whole scene 
which follows is a most beautiful illustration of the domestic 
manners and customs of the early Jews, and all in exact accord- 
ance with the given law. The kind and conciliatory manner 
of Boaz, “ the mighty man of wealth,” to his dependents ; his 
salutation, and their reply ; evince how completely the thought 
and recollection of the God of Israel was entwined with the 
daily work of his people. The intimate acquaintance which 
Boaz must have had with all his household, male and female, 
from his instant discovery of the youthful stranger, and the 
reply of the reapers, all breathe a refinement and civilization of 
feeling and action, found at this period only amidst the people 
of the Lord. 

Boaz confirmed the kindness of his dependents, by address- 
ing Ruth in words of such gentle courtesy, peculiarly adapted 
to reassure and soothe her. He not only tells her to. glean in 
his field alone — there was no need for her to go further — but 
to abide by his maidens, thus removing unconsciously all pain- 
ful feelings on her being a Moabitish stranger, which would keep 
her aloof. He told her, too, to follow close after the reapers, 
that she should receive neither harshness nor insult, and when 
she was athirst, to drink freely from that which the young men 
had drawn. 

With the respect ever proffered to real goodness, and 
astonished at such unexpected kindness, Ruth replied in words, 
the meekness and humility of which increased Boaz’s preposses- 
sion in her favor, and confirmed all which rumor had already pro- 
claimed concerning her. “ Why have I found grace in thy eyes,” 
she said, “ that thou shouldst take this knowledge of me, seeing 
I am a stranger?” And how must her heart have throbbed 
with natural pleasure at Boaz’s rejoinder, “ It hath been fully 
showed me all that thou hast done unto thy mother-in-law, 
siuce the death of thine husband : how thou hast left father and 
mothei, and the land of thy nativity, and art come unto a 
people which thou knewest not heretofore. The Lord recom- 
psnse thy work, and a full reward be given thee of the Lord 
God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust.” 
Deserved approbation is sweet, however some stern Stoics may 
say that virtue is its own reward, and if conscience approve! 




244 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


we need no more. Ruth must at once have felt that it was not 
the mere kindness springing from a good heart, which dictated 
Boaz’s conduct to her. but that she was known and appreciated, 
stranger as she was. A coarser and more worldly nature than 
that of Boaz, even while it equally benefited, would have 
exalted itself, not the being it served ; w r ould have manifested 
kindness only because it would obtain personal praise, and care, 
little for the feeling of the person served. Boaz, on the con- 
trary, removed the idea of obligation to himself by elevating 
Ruth, and making her believe that to her own virtue, not to his 
kindness, she owed the attention she received. “ Let me still 
find favor in thy sight, my lord,” was her grateful reply ; “ for 
thou hast comforted me, and hast spoken friendly to thy hand- 
maid, though I be not like one of thine own handmaidens.” We 
never find Ruth forgetting her origin, nor in any way assuming 
the privileges which her acceptance of and belief in Naomi’s 
God might naturally have assigned her ; a lowliness w'hich 
secured her, unasked, the privileges which, from a contrary 
conduct, would, no doubt, have been refused. 

Not content with desiring her freely to share the meal pro- 
vided for his reapers, Boaz himself reached her the “ parched 
corn,” — seeing that she ate till she was sufficed ; and when she 
rose up again to glean, he gave orders to let her glean amid 
the sheaves, and reproach her not, and also “ to let fall some 
handfuls on purpose for her.” His generosity, and her own 
perseverance, enabled her to take home an ephah of barley. 
And Naomi, eager to bring her child refreshment, not knowing 
how she might have fared during the day, “ brought forth and 
gave to her the food which she had reserved for her ;” affection- 
ately asking from her, at the same time, where and what she 
had gleaned, and fervently blessing him who had thus taken 
knowledge of her. Ruth’s reply elicited a burst of thanksgiving 
from Naomi. “ Blessed be the Lord, who hath not left off his 
kindness to the living and the dead.” She felt it was no chance, 
but her God, who had guided Ruth to the field of their kins- 
man, and infused his heart with kindness towards her. Con- 
vinced now that their restoration to their rights would be 
brought about by the direct agency of her God, she no longer 
scrupled to impart to Ruth the near relationship of Boaz ; and 
when Ruth repeated his ^junctions, to keep fast by his young 
men until they had ended all his harvest, Naomi, still tracing 


t 


PERIOD III. NAOMI. 


245 


Jvine agency, gladly replied, “ It is good, my daughter, that 
thou go out with his maidens, that they meet thee not in any 
other field.” And Ruth, in unquestioning obedience, “ kept fast 
by the maidens of Boaz, to glean unto the end of the barley 
and wheat harvest, and dwelt with her mother-in-law.” Not 
all that was in all probability reported of her devotion and 
beauty, could tempt her to turn aside from her lowly path of 
usefulness and good. Novelty and change could have had no 
glare for her, or she might have restlessly longed to join the 
gleaners of other fields. She was too grateful for the friendly 
kindness of Boaz, too devoted to her mother-in-law, to wish to 
go beyond the field of the former, or the humble house of the 
latter. “ Where thou lodgest I will lodge.” she had said, and 
her words were but the index of her actions. 

But the time had now come when her earthly lot was to 
undergo a material change. Naomi, who had, in all probability, 
passed the intervening days in thought and prayer, determined 
on seeking the rest and prosperity of her devoted daughter, 
according to the dictates of the law. She therefore gave Ruth 
the necessary directions — directions which to us may appear 
strange, and even revolting, but which seem, in the time of 
Naomi, to have been authorized by custom, and therefore con- 
taining nothing whatever indelicate or forward. To Ruth, as a 
Moabitess, the whole proceedings might have felt unusual, and 
perhaps even painful ; but we have neither remark nor hesita- 
tion. She asks not wherefore, but simply says, “ All that thou 
sayest unto me I will do.” She had proved the affection and 
wisdom of her mother-in-law much too long to doubt them now, 
however her own feelings and judgment might shrink from the 
course of action proposed. Naomi’s influence had ever been that 
of love , not of authority, and therefore was she ever sure of 
unquestioning obedience. 

Human means Naomi refused not to adopt, but still she letl 
the entire end of these means to the justice and mercy of her 
God. She knew that in His hand was the heart of Boaz, and 
therefore she merely told Ruth how to obtain his attention, 
leaving it to him “ to tell thee what thou shalt do convinced 
that the Lord, in whom she trusted, would order the end 
iright. 

All took place as she had anticipated. 

Waking in tenor at midnight — a terror not a little increased 


246 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


by finding some one lying at his feet — Boaz demanded, “ Who 
art thou ?” and received such a reply as at once calmed hia 
affright, and roused him to a renewal of all the nobleness and 
generosity of his character. Some of our Hebrew translators of 
this book suppose Ruth’s words, “ Spread, therefore, thy skirt 
over thine handmaid, for thou art a near kinsman,” to signify, 
u Give me thy protection as a husband and, as such, was in 
exact accordance with the law ; we rather incline towards the 
opinion. 

The reply of Boaz reassured the trembling suppliant ; for 
steadily she had adhered to the straight path of duty, “ follow- 
ing neither young men, neither rich nor poor,” so that the whole 
city “ knew that she was a virtuous woman.” He proceeded to 
inform her that he was indeed their near kinsman, but there 
was one still nearer, whose duty it was to perform the husband’s 
part ; but that if he refused, even he, Boaz, pledged himself to 
do so, as the Lord liveth, bidding her lie down till morning ; 
but ere the day broke so that one could recognise another, Ruth 
rose to depart, encouraged so to do by him with whom she had 
so fearlessly trusted herself, and whose care for her reputation 
was tender and thoughtful as a brother’s. Nor did he send her 
away empty. Fearful lest she and her mother-in-law might be 
in want ere the business could be settled, he filled her veil with 
six measures of barley, with which she returned to her home ; 
and Naomi bid her sit calmly down until they knew how the 
matter would fall. 

There is no need to transcribe the events detailed in the 
fourth chapter, from the 1st to the 12th verse. A reference to 
the word of God itself is all that is needed on the part of our 
readers, to impress them forcibly with the beautiful picture of 
the manners and customs of our ancestors which it presents. 
The gate of the city was always the place of public judgment, 
that all the people might be aware of what was going on, and 
give their suffrages, and witness for or against. Thither Boaz 
repaired the very next morning after his interview with Ruth, 
and sat him down, waiting the appearance of the person he haa 
named as the nearer of kin than himself. He hailed him on 
his approach, and the man willingly turned aside from his 
intended path, and sat down by the gate. Boaz next assembled 
ten elders, and stated his business. The field which Naomi 
wished disposed of, the kinsman seemed willing to redeem : but 


PERIOD III. NAOMI. 


247 


the remainder of his duty, to raise up the name of the dead to 
his inheritance, he refused, on the plea that to do so would 
interfere with his own inheritance ; requiring Boa z, in conse- 
quence, to redeem the right for himself, as he, the nearest kins- 
man, could not ; loosening at the same time his shoe, or glove, 
as some commentators believe, and giving it to his neighbor, as 
confirmation of his words. Boaz then addressed the elders and 
the people, bidding them be witness that he had purchased of 
the hand of Naomi all that was Elimelech, Chilion, and Mah- 
lon’s, and Ruth, the wife of Mahlon, to be his wife, that he might 
raise up the name of the dead, and so let it not be cut off from 
his brethren, or the gate of his place. And the elders of the 
people bore witness joyfully, coupled with earnest aspirations 
that the Lord might make the woman he had chosen, like 
Rachel and like Leah, who had built up the house of Israel ; 
and that he himself might “ do worthily in Ephratah, and be 
famous in Bethlehem.” 

And so he was : for as the great-grandfather of David, the 
name of Boaz must indeed be still famous in Judah, and dear 
to Israel. The uncomplaining submission and lowly trust of 
Naomi, and the filial obedience and devotion of Ruth, were 
both alike rewarded ; for the latter not only became the wife 
of the generous and noble-minded Boaz, but, in due course of 
time, God granted her a son ; and Naomi, who had believed 
herself but a withered branch, to which neither joy nor fruitful- 
ness might ever return, “ took the child, and laid it on her 
bosom, and became nurse to it.” We may read in the lively 
greetings of the women of Bethlehem, the joy which this event 
occasioned, and their affectionate sympathy in Naomi’s previous 
affliction. “ Blessed be the Lord,” they said, “ who hath not 
left thee this day without a kinsman, that his name may be 
famous in Israel. And he shall be unto thee a restorer of life, 
and a nourisher of thine old age, for thy daughter-in-law, who 
loveth thee, and who is better to thee than seven sons , hath 
borne him.” 

How beautifully do these words express the women of Israel’s 
appreciation and love of the gentle Moabitess ! The babe 
would be a restorer of Naomi’s life, and a cherisher of her old 
age, for he was Ruth's son. She who had been to Naomi 
better than seven sons (in the Hebrew the number is unlimited), 
would not fail to rear up her child in such virtue and holiness 


248 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


as would make his name indeed precious in Israel, and a bless- 
ing to his grandmother. Nor can we doubt that the affection 
and devotedness marking their mutual intercourse in adversity, 
was lessened in prosperity. The love which had been so 
mutually proved was not likely to decrease, but would rather 
deepen with every passing year. 

With the genealogy of Boaz, down to David, this most inter- 
esting book concludes ; and before we proceed to notice the 
beautiful lessons of domestic life which it inculcates, we would 
endeavor to prove how mistaken is the objection, sometimes 
brought forward, that Ruth, a Moabitess, should have been the 
ancestress of David, the elected servant of the Lord. When 
Ruth resigned alike home, parents, and the gods of her youth, 
she voluntarily engrafted herself upon the children of God ; and 
we know that such engrafting was permitted, not only from the 
Law, but from its after-explanation by the prophets. In the 
Law we repeatedly find the command to save the virgins alive , 
even of those nations whom they were commanded to extermi- 
nate, that they might be brought to the worship of the One 
true God, and multiply Israel. In the Prophets we read, that 
those of the stranger, whether male or female, who voluntarily 
accepted the covenants of the Lord, and kept His sabbaths and 
appointed feasts and ordinances, even had they been only 
eunuchs before, were (see Isaiah, chap. lxvi. 3-8), instead of 
being despised, to receive a place and a name in His house, 
better even than sons and daughters, an everlasting name 
which shall not be cut off, to be brought to the holy mountain, 
and made joyful in His house of prayer ; and their burnt-offer- 
ings and sacrifices, the essential privilege of the Holy People, 
accepted on God’s altar. In the Law, too, we find repeated 
injunctions, — “ love ye the stranger, for ye were strangers in 
the land of Egypt and by the whole history of Ruth we see 
how precisely this law was obeyed. She was one of those com- 
ing under the denomination of “ the stranger,” and who yet, 
from her acceptance of the Lord’s sabbaths, covenants, &c., all 
of which is implied in her own words, “ thy God shall be my 
God,” deserved and received the privileges enumerated above. 

She was yet more than a daughter in His sight, because her 
acceptance of, and obedience to the Law, were entirely voluntary ; 
not merely received from education and as heritage. That God 
is no respecter of persons, we read throughout the whole of His 


PERIOD III. NAOMI. 24 ( J 

changeless word. Faithfulness and virtue, the heart , — but 
neither birth nor appearance — are valued by Him. And when, 
therefore, Ruth turns from all the associations and scenes of her 
youth, to adopt and accept the religion of Naomi, and faithfully 
serve her God, she is in act no longer a Moabitess (and is only 
called so to designate her as a stranger amidst Israel), but as 
worthy, if not even more so, to be the ancestress of David, than 
the lineal descendants of Abraham, who were Israelites, because 
God had selected them so to be ; not for their own sakes, or 
their own worth, but simply for the love He bore, and the pro- 
mise He made unto His favored servants. Ruth became an 
Israelite from voluntary adoption. Her filial devotion and 
reverence was the most exquisite illustration of how she not 
only accepted, but obeyed the Law ; and, from the character 
of David, still more than even his selection, we may easily infer 
how faithfully she not only obeyed the Law herself, but trans- 
mitted it to her descendants. That the Eternal should have 
selected a king whose great-grandmother was of Moabitisb 
descent, cannot, then, we think, with any justice be brought 
forward as matter either of wonder or objection. If it were 
unlawful for any stranger to be engrailed upon Israel we should 
not find so many laws regarding “ the stranger” in the Mosaic 
code itself, nor their practical commentary in Isaiah, as quoted 
above. Her virtue and goodness gave her favor in the sight 
alike of God and man, and rendered her worthy of being the 
ancestress of that holy line whence the Messiah himself will 
spring — while her voluntary acceptance of the God, and of 
course the faith, of Naomi, removed from her own Moabitish 
birth all reproach, and gave her yet a dearer name in the eyes 
of God and of His people than even that of daughter. 

• To us, as women of Israel, the whole book of Ruth teems 
with unspeakable consolation and support. It is a picture so 
vivid of the manners, customs, aye, and even feelings of Israel at 
that period, that even Gentile writers are struck by it, and refer 
to it with high eulogiums on its touching beauty and impressive 
truth. Shall we then value it less, and refuse to draw from it 
the strong confirmation which it contains of our contested point 
— the refined and elevated position of the women of Israel 
themselves, and the tender yet respectful consideration with 
which they were regarded by their brethren ? Will any orm 


250 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


point of Naomi’s character permit us to suppose, that during 
her husbands lifetime she was merely a slave, with neither reli- 
gious, moral, nor intellectual training ? Had she been such in 
Elimelech’s lifetime, such she must have remained. Instead of 
which, from her determination to return to her own land, and 
worship her God once more amongst her own people, we per- 
ceive that she was a woman of strong mind and unfailing 
energy ; while from the affection of both her sons’ wives, and 
the devotion of one, we must equally infer that she possessed, 
and in her domestic duties must have displayed, such winning 
and amiable qualities, as to call such affection forth ; these 
characteristics, and all which follow — the refined and retiring 
dignity, the correct judgment, and also the patient faith in her 
God — all were quite incompatible with a degraded position 
either individually or socially. It is very clear, then, that not 
in any received Law of Israel could the position of the women 
of Israel have been that which our enemies so ignorantly report. 
If two Laws were in action at this period, one must have been 
an exact repetition of the other, or in a book like that of Ruth, 
so strikingly illustrative of the national character and customs, 
some difference must have been discernible. 

If, then, the charge on modern Judaism be really founded on 
apparent truth, it must be a state of things brought about by 
the awful horrors of persecution, and their natural effect in nar- 
rowing and brutalizing the human mind. In all that relates to 
Ruth too, we see the real light in which the Hebrew woman 
was regarded, very clearly. We should not find her filial devo- 
tion and individual goodness so appreciated by all the Bethle- 
hemites, female as well as male, were not virtue and goodness 
in woman subjects of admiration, of cherishing, and respect. It 
was not only in obedience to the Law, which commanded love 
and kindness to be showrn towards the stranger, that Boaz so 
encouraged and cherished her when first gleaning in his field. 
He expressly states the wherefore, because of her devotion to her 
mother-in-law, and her having given up her father’s gods to 
accept Him under whose wings she had come to trust. “ A full 
reward shall be given thee from the Lord,” he says ; thus mark- 
ing her as accepted and cherished by God as well as man. .The 
most reverential yet fatherly care marks the whole of his con- 
duct towards her , and here we see very strongly marked the 


PERIOD III. NAOMI. 


251 


obedience to the law instituted for the benefit of the stranger ; 
he not only “ showed kindness,” but literally left for her the 
“ gleanings of his field.” 

The third chapter of the sacred story most emphatically proves 
the superiority of morality and civilization in Israel, over the 
known world. In what other nation could Ruth have so trusted 
herself, as she did to the honor and justice of Boaz ? How fully 
must Naomi have been assured of the safety of her child, or how 
could she have counselled such a mode of proceeding ? and how 
completely she was justified in her confidence, we read in Boaz’s 
anxiety to save Ruth from all insulting remarks, by letting it 
“ not be known that a woman had been to the floor.” 

Again, in Boaz’s instant pursuance of Ruth’s suit, we very 
clearly perceive that women must have been considered of some 
account ; and also another important point in a national view, 
Boaz’s exact obedience to the formula of the Law, in calling the 
nearest kinsman to give his attention to the subject, and decide, 
notwithstanding his own evident anxiety to obtain Ruth as 
his wife, unquestionably proves, that as the Law was so strictly 
kept in one point, so it would be in all ; and consequently there 
could have been, neither practically nor theoretically, any one 
single statute to the disparagement of woman. 

The very joy of the whole people in Boaz’s decision to make 
Ruth his wife ; their hearty congratulations, and earnest wishes for 
his£ welfare, and hers, that she might be as Leah and Rachel ; the 
delight of the women, and their joyous sympathy with Naomi 
at the unexpected issue to all her misfortunes ; all prove the 
beautiful unity and love marking the people of the Lord. All 
seemed to vie with each other in making their respective tribes 
as one affectionate family, bound by the same ties, hoping the 
same hope, trusting the same God, weeping with those that wept, 
and rejoicing with those that joyed. 

Such a state of things could never have existed if the women 
of Israel had not been, morally, spiritually, and intellectually, on 
a perfect equality with man. 

Regarding tbs book of Ruth in its final bearings — that is, as 
it concerns women in general — we are particularly struck with 
the exquisite lesson of maternal and filial affection which it 
teaches. The beauty of Ruth’s words and actions sometimes 
occupies attention alone, to the exclusion of the tenderness charac- 
terizing Naomi, which, to our feelings, is equally touching 


252 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


and impressive. Ruth’s determination to quit her own land, 
her parents, and their gods, was indeed one of beautiful self- 
devotion ; but it was evidently love, not duty, which impelled 
h and that love must have been called forth by the tenderness 
she had originally received. Seldom is the love of the young 
excited to such an extent towards an elder, unless by affection 
and appreciation from that elder, invited so to love ; and not 
only invited but retained by unwavering kindness and regard. 
That such feelings had always actuated NaoLii towards her 
daughter-in-law, we infer, from the caressing tenderness with 
which, in all that passes between them, she invariably addressed 
her. We never can read either coldness or indifference, much 
less the harsh mistrust, breathing often more in tone than actual 
words, which sometimes characterizes the manner of an elder 
towards a younger. All she says, either in persuasion to return, 
or in advice or inquiry, is with the same caressing love. In her 
bringing forth on Ruth’s return the remains of the day’s meal, 
which she had been compelled to take while Ruth was absent, 
how touchingly we read the love lingering with her absent child, 
the thought of saving for her the evening meal, and bringing it 
with eager haste the moment Ruth appeared, not knowing how 
she might have fared during the hot and weary day. 

Oh ! while we would have our young sisters imitate, as they 
cannot fail to love, the conduct of Ruth, will not their elders do 
well to ponder on, and imitate, the tenderness of Naomi ? 
Youth will not, cannot love, a pure unselfish love, unless invited 
so to do ; no, not even in the sanctuary of home, not even 
parents, unless love, not only felt but displayed in confidence 
and caressing kindness, marks the parental conduct. Duty done 
on either side is not enough, for it is not according to the spirit 
of the Lord, and of His word. There love predominates, and so 
should it predominate in the homes of His children. We do not 
deny that it does, but we would have it displayed as well as felt, 
by every member of that hallowed temple, home. Brothers and 
sisters, parents and children, twined together in that sacred 
silvery link, unbroken even by death ; for they know it is immor- 
tal. Love not only felt, but breathing in every tone, and 
actuating every deed; confidence and trust — mutually given, 
mutually felt. How thrice blessed would such things make 
home ! The parental heart would not then bleed in secret, al 
what seems like neglect and unkindness, if not an utter want of 


PERIOD III. — NAOMI. 


253 


love. Nor would the young spirit shrink within itself, chilled 
and sad — yearning for affection spoken as well as felt ; and 
utterly unconscious how truly and how deeply they may still 
he loved. How different is that home where no gentle word is 
heard — no caress asked for, or voluntarily bestowed — no inter- 
change of mutual thought ; but each member walks alone, seek- 
ing no sympathy save from the stranger, caring not to shed one 
flower on the parental hearth, and believing they have no place 
in the parental heart save as a child , words of which, until they 
are parents themselves, they know not, guess not, the unutterable 
meaning. How different is such a home to that where love is 
visible ! Where parents and, as its natural consequence, chil- 
dren vie with each other, as to who can prove it most ; and by 
the words and manners of daily life, throw such a beautiful halo 
even over its cares and sorrows, as inexpressibly heightens its 
sweetest joys. 

There are some to doubt the love that dwells in caressing 
words and a loving manner. Yet why should it be doubted, 
till its absence has been proved? Why should the gentle 
power be despised, which will make daily life happier, and so 
inexpressibly soothe the sickness and sorrow which ask but love 
alone. No ! It is the icy surface we must doubt, for never yet 
were there warm and unselfish loving hearts, who could think 
it necessary to suppress such fond emotions in the sweet sanctu- 
ary of home. It is the cold at heart who never give domestic 
affections vent, and can therefore never hope so to attract the 
young, as to rouse them to evince the love they could have felt, 
or proffer more than the cold, dull routine of daily duty. We 
must love to be loved — we must evince that love, would we so 
unite ymng hearts to our own, as, if needed, to sacrifice all of 
self for us, or to devote life, energy, hope, all to our service. 
Would wj have our daughters Ruths, we must be Naomis; we 
have no right, no pretence, to demand more than we evince, as 
well as give. Reserve, coldness, command, may win us duty, 
but duty in the domestic circle is a poor substitute for love. 
Even kindness in act is often undervalued, nay, absolutely 
unknown, if it be not hallowed by the kindness of manner and 
of word. In the world , words and manner may be deceiving, but 
not in the temple of home ; for the love which would there 
dictate kiudness of manner must equally incite kind deeds. 
The latter may exist without the former, and if only one may 


£54 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


have existence, we may grant the superiority of good deeds 
though there are some griefs, some trials, which kindly words 
may soothe, where action has no power. Oh ! let us unite the 
two as Ruth and Naomi — and however dark and troubled our 
earthly course, a light will shine within our homes, which no 
sorrow, nor care, nor even death, will have power to darken oi 
remove. God is Love — the spirit of His word is Love ; and 
would we indeed walk according to His dictates, Love, proved 
alike in word and deed, must be the Guardian Angel of cui 
homes ! 


CHAPTER VI. 

HANNAH. 

In the history of the Jews by Josephus, the story of Hannah 
is mentioned as taking place before that of Ruth. We pre'ei 
following the arrangement of the Bible, although it is not 
improbable that Ruth and Hannah lived much at the same 
time ; for we find the son of Hannah, when a very old man, 
visiting the grandson of Ruth, then in his prime, to choose from 
his household his youngest born as the anointed of the Lord. 
The period of the existence of these two beautiful female cha- 
racteis is in itself of little importance ; but it is interesting to 
trace the intimate connexion of their descendants, thrown 
together as they were so closely in after life. 

There was a certain man, living in the city of Rama Sophim 
of Mount Ephraim, an Ephrathite by descent, named Elkanah, 
who had two wives, Hannah and Peninnah. It is a remarkable 
fact, that this is the very first mention of a man having two 
wives since the days of Jacob. Joseph, Moses, Aaron and his 
sons, Caleb, Othniel, Lapidoth, Manoah, Elimelech, Chilion, and 
Mahlon, all had but one wife; a striking confirmation of our 
former assertion, that though polygamy was permitted, from its 


PERIOD III. HANNAH. 


255 


being an immemorial usage, it was not , in the early days of 
Israel, considered a necessary part of their domestic policy ; and 
that almost every great and good man selected by the Eternal 
to work His will, before the monarchy, had but the one wife 
for whom the laws were given ; and so evinced, in their own 
persons, the incipient dawnings of that more refined and 
elevated state of being and society, which in the natural progres- 
sion of humanity would undoubtedly ensue. 

The abuse of the permission to have more than one wife 
without transgressing the Law, which grew to such an awful 
height during the continuance of the monarchy, is no evidence of 
the degrading nature of the Law, but is the literal fulfilment of 
the threatened wrath of the Eternal, when the people insisted 
upon having an earthly king to rule over them, like other 
nations. That he would not only take unto himself their 
store and their fields, and their olive-yards and vineyards, but 
even their sons and their daughters to minister to his service 
and his pleasures ; and, of course, the licentious conduct of the 
sovereign would be followed by equal license in his subjects. 

But before the monarchy, though the people were ever in 
rebellion and disobedience, still no such domestic abuses had 
existence. Even when there were two wives, as in the case we 
are about to consider, we find the beautiful laws, instituted for 
domestic equity and peace, entering and guiding a man’s house- 
hold, as the Eternal had intended in their bestowal. Yet even 
these, while they prevented all justice on the part of the 
husband, could not entirely do away with the evils of a divided 
household, which Sacred Writ never fails to record for our 
warning. 

“ And Elkanah, with his wives and household, went up out 
of his city yearly to worship and sacrifice unto the Lord in 
Shiloh,” then the residence of God’s holy ark, and of his priests, 
— a practical confirmation of the law so to do, which we have 
already noticed. At these times, “ he gave to Peninnah his wife, 
and to all her sons and daughters, portions, but unto Hannah 
he gave a double portion ; for he loved Hannah : though the 
Lord had not granted her any children,” — loved her for herself, 
even above Peninnah, though she had given him a goodly 
progeny, and Hannah had but her own gentle virtues, which 
were sufficient for her husband. 

But in Israel the denial of children was considered too sad a 


256 


THE WOMEN OF 


SRAEL. 


reproach, too painfully a proof of individual unworthiness in th« 
sight of God, for the meek spirit of Hannah to endure it with- 
out bitter grief ; a grief painfully aggravated by the provoca- 
tions of her more favored rival, whose unkind reproaches 
increased with every year that diminished Hannah’s hope. 
Still, Holy Writ tells us of no complaint on the part of Hannah 
against Peninnah. As the more beloved by her husband, had 
she trld him of the continual provocations she received, she 
might have been sure of such interference as would have 
effectually shielded her from them in future, though at the 
expense of alienating Peninnah from her husband, and causing 
domestic strife. But such a course of acting was not according 
to Hannah’s character. It was easier far to suffer than to com- 
plain ; sweeter far to endure herself than seek revenge upon 
another. 

Each visit to Shiloh excited anew the reproaches of Penin- 
nah ; and as this took place some years before Elkanah noticed 
the deep grief of his favorite wife, we may in a degree suppose 
the extent of Hannah’s gentle forbearance. Hers was no trial 
of a day, or even a month, but of years ; and can we imagine 
anything more trying to the heart and temper, than to live 
with one whose tongue was ever bitter with reproach ? because 
it is not likely that it was only during their visits to Shiloh that 
“ Peninnah provoked her sore, to make her fret,” and provoked 
her for no fault ; for nothing which Hannah herself could 
remedy, but simply for being less favored by the Lord. And 
yet, how many are there like her ! How many love to reproach 
instead of soothe, as if sorrow and disappointment were the 
fault of the sufferers, not the loving sentence of the Lord ! 
How many there are who thus make a daily life bitter to their 
fellows, instead of, as they might do, rendering grief less sad, 
and inexpressibly heightening joy. 

Their visits to Shiloh must have been fraught with deep 
suffering to Hannah. It was not only the signal of Peninnah’s 
aggravated unkindness ; but the very sight of all her fellow- 
countrymen flocking to the temple of the Lord,* with their 
goodly show of sons and daughters, must have made her pious 


* Though that house of God wLich we are accustomed to Tigard as 
the Temple was not built till the reign of Solomon, the residence of tht 
Ark of God was always called the Temple. See 1 Sam. i. 9. 


PERIOD HI. HANNAH. 257 

heart shrink deeper and deeper within itself in its own unspoken 
woe : and it is shown in her spirit’s sad but unmurmuring 
inquiry, “ Why had the Lord whom she loved and sought to 
serve, so reproached and forsaken her ?” That this was really 
the case, and her grief was never spoken, never found vent in 
reproachful words, we know by Elkanah’s gently reproving 
address. “ Hannah, why weepest thou ?” he said, “ why eatest 
thou not ? and why is thy heart grieved ? Am not I better to 
thee than ten sons ?” Here there is no reference to anything 
but Hannah’s visible sorrow, and to Elkanah’s natural supposi- 
tion as to the cause of her grief ; and in perfect accordance 
with the meek enduring beauty of her true womanly character, 
she makes no complaining answer. It would have been easy 
for her to exculpate herself for too repining sorrow by invectives 
against her happier rival ; but she who had borne so much and 
so long, was far too spiritual for such petty revenge. Answer 
to man, save such as affection would dictate, the struggle to 
smile and be happy for a loved one’s sake, she made none; but 
sought relief, where alone it might be found, at the footstool of 
her God — woman’s best and surest refuge. For how may man, 
even when most loving, most beloved, so know the secret nature 
of a woman’s heart, as to bring the balm it seeks, and give the 
strength it needs ? Elkanah’s words reveal the extent and 
truth of his love ; and had it not been for the daily provoca- 
tions of Peninnah, he might indeed have been to Hannah 
“ better than ten sons but she had griefs and trials of which 
he knew nothing, — peculiarly her own, as what woman has 
not ? — and these, in childlike faith and voiceless prayer, she 
brought unto her God. 

The condition of married women amongst the Jews, in the 
time of the Judges, must have been perfectly free and unre- 
strained. We find her rising up after they had eaten ana 
drunk in Shiloh, and without even imparting her intentions to 
her husband, much less asking his consent, going perfectly 
unattended and unrebuked to the temple of the Lord. There, 
in bitterness of soul weeping, she prayed unto the Lord of 
Hosts ; and, in perfect accordance with the Mosaic Law, which 
expressly provided for such emergencies, she vowed a vow, that 
.f the Eternal would in His infinite mercy remember His hand* 
maid, and grant her a male child, she would devote him unto 


258 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


Mie Lord all the days of his life, and not a razor should cora« 
near his head. 

But she prayed not aloud, nor in any stated formula of 
prayer ; she prayed merely as the heart dictated : “ she spoke 
in her heart,” as we have it in the touching language of Scrip- 
ture, — only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard ; and 
Eli, the high priest, who sat beside one of the posts of the 
temple, marked her mouth, and hearing no word, combined 
with the agitated figure before him, believed she was drunken, 
and, reproaching her, bade her put her wine from her. 

It must have been an aggravation of her sorrow to find her- 
self so misunderstood by one, who, as high priest, she might 
with some justice believe would have required no explanation 
on her part, but, in the name of the Eternal, have proffered her 
relief at once. Still we find nothing in her touchingly beautiful 
reply to evince a failing in the firm faith which brought her 
there. “ No, my lord,” she answered, “I am a woman of a 
sorrowful spirit ; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, 
but have poured out my soul before the Lord. Count not 
thine handmaid for a daughter of Belial ; for out of the abun- 
dance of my grief and complaint have I spoken hitherto. Then 
Eli answered and said, Go in peace, and the God of Israel grant 
thee thy petition that thou hast asked of Him :” and, without 
doubt, without question, Hannah simply answered, “ Let thine 
handmaid find grace in thy sight,” — meaning, to remember her 
in his prayers, — and then “she went her way, and did eat, and 
her countenance was no more sad.” 

The exquisite lesson and consolation which these verses con- 
tain (1 Sam. i. 9-19) w r e will defer to our concluding observa- 
tions, now merely narrating the history itself. At the conclusion 
of the festival, Elkanah and his family returned to Ramah, 
where the Eternal in His mercy remembered His faithful 
servant, and taking from her her reproach, in due course of 
time granted her the son for which she had so earnestly prayed ; 
and in joyful acknowledgment that it was in answer to her 
prayer he had been given, she called him Samuel, or “ asked 
of the Lord.” 

The time again came round for Elkanah and his family to 
make their yearly offerings in Shiloh ; and by the allusion to 
a vow of Elkanah’s (see verse 21) we may infer that Hanaab 


PERIOD III. HANNAH. 


259 


had of course imparted to him her vow, and received noi only 
his unqualified sanction, but that he was anxious, in his next 
visit to the temple of the Eternal, himself to confirm it. We 
find, too, as we ought previously to have noticed, the day after 
Hannah had been to the temple, that they (probably herself 
and her husband) rose up in the morning early, and “ worshipped 
before the Lord a worship, possibly, of thanksgiving and 
rejoicing on the part of both ; on Elkanah’s that his beloved 
wife was no longer sad, on Hannah’s that her prayer was heard ; 
for that it was heard, it is evident she never entertained a 
doubt, long before she could have had proof that it really was 
so. That this early, worship had to do with the vow is, how- 
ever, of course a mere suggestion : the Word of God is open 
to all ; we would not compel the adoption of am suggestion, 
to which both reason and feeling cannot give reply. 

Hannah, however, when the time of the yearly sacrifice 
arrived, refused to go up, saying to her husband, “ I will not 
go up, till the child is weaned ; and then I will bring him, that 
he may appear before the Lord, and there abide for ever a 
resolution freely approved of by Elkanah. “ Do what seemeth 
thee good,” he replied, “ tarry until thou hast weaned him.” 
This incident is a striking confirmation of all which we brought 
forward in the Second Period of our history, regarding the 
appearance and the non-appearance of the female part of a 
Jewish household in the Temple at the times appointed. 

The history of Elkanah and his family illustrates this law 
exactly. That women as well as men were to appear in the house 
of the Lord, and join in his worship, is proved by both Hannah 
and Peninnah, with the latter’s children, attending their husband 
to Shiloh ; and that the law to go up thrice a year was only 
binding upon males from the many causes which might prevent 
females, particularly mothers, from so doing, we perceive by 
Hannah’s tarrying till her child was weaned, and having her 
husband’s free permission so to do. 

The time at length came, when in obedience to her volun* 
tary vow, Hannah must part from her boy, and deliver him up 
to the service of the God whose mercy had bestowed him to her 
prayer. Her only one, precious beyond all price ! yet we find 
no hesitation, no thought of delay, no idea of forgetting that 
which she had vowed, though the nature of her vow, nay, that 
she had vowed at all, was unknown to all, even to the high 


200 


r H JE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


priest, who had promised that her prayer should be granted 
without knowing what it was. Without listening to the mater- 
nal anxieties that must have engrossed her, we find her, directly 
the child w:is weaned, taking him with her to Shiloh, and three 
bullocks, and one ephah of flour, and a bottle of wine, — offer- 
ings from the store, and the field, and the vineyard, — all in 
exact accordance with the written Law, and they came unto the 
house of the Lord, and they slew a bullock there, and brought 
the child to Eli. “ And she said, O my lord, as thy soul liv- 
eth, my lord, I am the woman that stood by thee here praying 
unto the Lord. For this child I prayed, and the Lo:d hath 
given me my petition which I asked of Him, and therefore also 
have I lent him to the Lord : as long as he liveth he shall be 
lent to the Lord. And he worshipped the Lord there,” — rather 
an obscure phrase, but probably signifying that Eli worshipped 
the Lord, in acknowledgment of His divine goodness, in thus 
permitting his words to come to pass, and giving the woman 
that which she desired. 

The prayer, or rather hymn, of thanksgiving in which Han- 
nah poured forth her gratitude to her God in a strain of the 
sublimest poetry and vivid conception of the power and good- 
ness of Him whom she addressed, is a forcible illustration of the 
intellectual as well as the spiritual piety which characterized the 
women of Israel, and which in its very existence denies the pos- 
sibility of degradation applying to women, either individually, 
socially, or domestically. Their intellect must have been of a 
very superior grade ; while the facility of throwing the aspira- 
tions of the spirit into the sublimest poetry, evinces constant 
practice in so doing, and proves how completely prayer and 
thanksgiving impregnated their vital breath. It is useless quot- 
ing this beautiful song of praise, when the blessed word which 
contains it is open to all classes and ages of readers; but we 
would beseech our young friends not to be satisfied with this 
uninspired notice, but to turn to the word themselves, and maik 
the soul-felt clinging piety throughout. It is as exact a tran- 
script of the swelling gratitude of a truly pious heart, as hei 
prayer before had breathed its bitterness cf grief. Some there 
are who gladly come to their God in sorrow, but quite forget 
that the seasons of joy should be devoted to Him as well. Han- 
nah was evidently not of these ; but one of the most perfectly 
spiritually pious characters of the Bible. There was no self 


PERIOD 111. — HANNAH. 


251 


exaltation in her song of praise ; no supposition that for anj 
individual worth her reproach had been removed ; or even that 
any peculiarly meritorious fervor in her prayer had wrought 
reply. No ; all was of the Lord. All came from His exceeding 
mercy — His omnipotent power. It was he who had made bare 
His holy arm, and to the barren given children. He who gave 
strength to those that stumbled, while the arms of mighty men 
were broken — He who maketh poor, and raaketh rich — He who 
bringeth low, and lifteth up — He who killeih, and maketh alive 
— for “ by strength no man shall prevail.” 

Nor was it only because she was permitted thus to rejoice, 
and behold the power she exalted, that Hannah so magnified 
the Lord, and believed in His wisdom and love to do all that 
He willed. She must have known a«d felt all her hymn 
expressed in her time of grief, else we should not have .seen her 
in lowly supplication, prostrate in the court of the Lord’s house 
— beseeching His relief. She must have believed , else she could 
not thus have prayed. 

Lonely and sad must have been the feelings of this true 
Hebrew mother when she returned to her house at Ramah, 
leaving her beautiful boy with the high priest, and knowing 
that but three times in the year might she behold him ; and 
then not to receive from him the service and caresses of a son, 
but only to look on him as one devoted to his God and to His 
service ! How must her heart have yearned for the engaging 
prattle, the caressing playfulness, the lovely looks of clinging 
love, which had so blessed her since his birth ! What a blank 
in her existence must have been his absence ! and what but 
spiritual trust and devoted love to her God, could have brought 
her consolation ? The feelings alike of her human and spiritual 
nature are so exquisitely portrayed by that beautiful delineator 
of woman’s spiritual character, Mrs. Hemans, that we can but 
refer our readers to her pages, convinced that it will aid them to 
enter into the full beauty of Hannah’s character, and the extent 
of her trial in parting from her boy.* 

Licentiousness and sin had crept into the very bosom of the 
Temple, through the conduct of the high priest’s sons. Yet, in 
the midst of impurity, under the too indulgent control of an 
aged man whose laxity of parental discipline exposed him tv 

* See Mrs. Hemans’s Poema, vol. iv. p 169. 


262 


THK WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


the anger of the Lord, still was the child Samuel kept pure and 
undefiled even as he left his mother’s roof, and, whi.e yet a 
child, ministered before the Lord. His so doing explains and 
confirms the law of the Nazarite, and singular vow, to which we 
alluded in our Second Period, as implying devotion to tho 
Lord’s service, which even children might perform (see Lev 
xxvii. 6) by some personal service. It is thus we so repeatedly 
find the Hagiography, or historical parts of the Bible, containing 
the practical illustration of the theoretical statutes, exactly as 
Moses gave them, and so rendering the Holy Scriptures in very 
truth the verified transcript of the Eternal will. Moses’ instruc- 
tions to the elders regarding the practical obedience to the law, 
must have been in exact accordance with that which, being 
written, was, and is still* open to our perusal ; or we should have 
found some traces of its difference in the manners and customs 
of our ancestors. All, therefore, in Modern Judaism, which is 
accused of contradicting the spirit of the eternal holy word, 
cannot have had its origin in either of the laws, oral or written, 
transmitted by Moses. We are anxious always to notice, as 
forcibly as may be, those portions of the Bible containing the 
'practical confirmation of the written laws of Moses, because we 
have heard (though we can scarcely believe it) that the written 
word of the Eternal is pronounced by some as imperfect and 
incomplete. The promulgators of such a fearful doctrine are 
not perhaps aware that by so doing, and so depriving our 
females and youth of both sexes of their only stay, and strength, 
and consolation, they are opening a wider avenue and offering a 
greater temptation to embrace Christianity, than was ever 
proffered by our opponents. To guard the women of Israel from 
such insidious danger, we are tempted to wander from our main 
subject, whenever the opportunity offers, to give them refuge 
and strength by the conviction that for <Am, at least, the Word 
of the Most High is all-sufficient, containing, as it does, in the 
historical books, the practical illustration , and in the prophets 
the spiritual explanation, of the whole Mosaic system, whether 
imparted by word of mouth or dash of pen. Of the delivery or 
non-delivery by the Eternal of an oral law, we write not at all* 
as it is a subject much too learned and too weighty for a 
woman; and we are ready and willing to submit our opinions 
on all points to the wisdom and piety of our venerable sages. 
We only affirm, what we think no Hebrew will contradict, that 


PERIOD III. II AMMAN. 


263 


as the God of Israel is a God of changeless truth and wisdom, 
He would not have desired Moses to write that which speech 
was to deny ; in other words, that each law must be so perfect 
and so exact a counterpart of the other, that in our present 
captive state, the Bible provided through the eternal mercy for 
this very emergency, must be the key to both laws, and so per- 
fect in itself. 

Though the evil conduct of the sons of Eli was well known, 
Ilannah does not appear to have entertained a fear as to the 
effect of their example upon the tender years of her child. It 
was not likely that she who, in all her individual joys and sor- 
rows, came to her God in prayer, should neglect that holy duty 
for the welfare of her boy. She had experienced too consolingly 
the effect of faith and prayer, to doubt them now ; and as a 
mother, a Hebrew mother — one whose whole heart was love 
and praise to God, we may quite believe that, day and night, 
her meek and humble orisons arose for her boy, that he might 
become all that would make him indeed a faithful servant of his 
God ; for in being such, he would be all her heart could wish. 
Some mothers, indeed, there may be, who, when they send their 
children from them, and provide them with all things needful 
for temporal welfare, think they have done sufficient, and only 
remember them with mere human, and consequently perish- 
able, affections; rejoicing in their prosperity, anxious when ill, 
desirous for them to “get on,” — an emphatic though not elegant 
phrase for the world’s success. And if they do all they can to 
forward this “ getting-on,” in the way of education and lavish 
expenditure, what more could be required of them ? Some will 
answer, “ Nothing.” Others may feel, as Hannah must have 
felt, that though their children may no longer be beneath their 
roof — though all of human means is done, to further their 
advancement, what will it all avail without the blessing of the 
Lord ? And how may such blessing be attained, save with 
faithful and unceasing prayer ? Prayer, that unites us in spirit 
alike with our beloved ones, and our God. Oh, is . there one 
who really loves, be it as a parent, wife, child, betrothed, or 
friend, and can yet rest secure and happy without prayer ? If 
we have never prayed before, we must when we feel love. Can 
we love in any single relation of life, and yet not feel the 
craving, the desire, the absolute necessity to pour out our hearts 
to our God for our beloved ones, and in them for ourselves f 


264 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


Can we rest quiet, incapacitated, perhaps, from active service by 
circumstances, and not at least seek to serve by fervent prayer \ 
And if in every relation of life this must be the effect of love, 
oh ! more than in any other must we find it in a mother for a 
child ! What love can be like hers, so watchful, so changeless, 
w unwearied ? And how may she still the anxious throbbings 
of her heart, when divided from its earthly treasures, save by 
simple trust and fervid prayer ? 

And when we look back on the character of Ilannah, as it has 
already been displayed, can we doubt that such were her feelings, 
that she could have supposed merely to leave her child with the 
high priest was sufficient — that nothing more depended on her- 
self? She who in all things had prayed ? No, prayer must 
have sanctified her offering, not only when offered, but when 
apart from him. She had naught but prayer for him on which 
to rest. And might it not have been, nay, was it not, that 
mother’s prayer, which retained her boy in such pure and lowly 
piety, in such singleness of purpose and faithfulness of heart, in 
the very midst of the licentiousness reigning around ? Long 
before Samuel could have prayed for himself, must Hannah’s 
prayers have ascended for him, and in his favor, both with the 
Lord and with men — she had her answer. 

Every time of her visit to Shiloh, we find Ilannah bringing a 
little coat, or robe, for her child, the work of her own hands, 
which had fondly lingered on the task from month to month, 
in the periods of absence ; and Eli blessed Elkanab and his 
wife, and said, “ the Lord give thee seed of this woman, for the 
loan which is lent to the Lord.” Now, though not till several 
verses after the narration of Hannah’s address to the high nriest, 
when leaving Samuel with him, these words were most proba- 
bly spoken when he first accepted the offering of the child ; and 
the Lord did visit Hannah, and granted her three more sons, 
and two daughters, thus powerfully proving, that the Eternal 
ever returns double, and more than double, that which we 
devote to Him ; be it the affections, the intellect, the will ; or 
that more active service, charity and good works. Hannah 
devoted to Him her all, her only one, caring not for the conquest 
of seif which this resignation of her treasure must have 
demanded ; and the Eternal, in His infinite mercy, granted her 
five in the place of one. And what was it which had originally 
turned aside her reproach, and inclined the Lord towards her 1 


PERIOD III. HANNAH. 


265 


No great work — no mighty sacrifice — no wealthy offering; it 
was none of these, but simple faith and heartfelt prayer. 

With the information that she became the mother of five 
ihildren, Holy Writ concludes the history of Hannah ; but 
knowing the longevity of Scriptural characters, we are justified 
in inferring that she was spared to feel to the full, all the 
happiness which her first-born’s matured character must havo 
excited. 

We hear of not one failing from his earliest childhood. We 
read of his unvarying integrity and single-minded obedience 
to the word of his God, from his first repetition to Eli of the 
Eternal’s awful sentence, to the conclusion of his career ; inter- 
fering as that obedience so repeatedly did, with his own private 
feelings, alike towards Eli, in the selection of a king, and in all 
his conduct towards Saul. If Hannah lived until the monarchy, 
she must indeed have been blessed in the innate goodness and 
love, and in the popularity of her child, and have felt that 
in nursing him for the Lord, she had indeed received “ her 
wages.” 

The history we have been regarding, though brief in itself, is 
yet so fraught with importance to us as women of Israel, and 
as women in general, that we trust we shall be pardoned for 
dwelling upon it in all its bearings at some length. Forcibly 
as the stories of Naomi and Deborah marked the real position 
of the Israelitish women, and proved their powers alike of intel- 
lect, judgment, and spirituality, as well as the deferential light 
in which they were regarded by their countrymen, the history 
of Hannah brings their perfect freedom and equality, even in 
the marriage state, yet more distinctly forward. Deborah was 
inspired to do the will of the Lord ; gifted, extraordinarily and 
expressly, to judge and deliver her countrymen. Naomi was a 
widow, uishackled by either conjugal or household duties, and 
with no relation whatever to interfere with her proceedings. 
Hannah was one of two wives, her husband living, and the head 
of a wealthy household ; consequently, she must have had all 
her part of the domestic economy to look after and perform ; 
yet there could not have been the very smallest restraint upon 
either her temporal proceedings or spiritual feelings. She does 
not even ask her husband’s acquiescence, much less depend 
upon his consent to seek the house of God. Her very going to 
pray must have excited remark, and even scandal, if such had 


266 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


not been the common sustom of the nation. And if women 
were not permitted to pray for themselves, Eli would have 
rebuked her presumption, and desired her to send her husband, 
as the only chance of her wishes being granted; instead of 
which, when once convinced she was praying with earnestness 
and in sorrow, he bids her “ go in peace,” for God would hearken 
to her. 

Again, had she not possessed perfect fieedora of will and 
action, she could not have vowed her child to God. Unless she 
had been perfectly sure that her husband reposed sufficient 
confidence in her, to abide by her decision, she could not have 
so devoted him, without, as it were, mocking the majesty of 
the Lord, by making a promise which she had not the power 
to perform. 

That her vow was subject to the approbation of her husband, 
we believe, because such deference was commanded in our law 
But Elkanah’s full acquiescence throughout, clearly proves the 
high esteem in which he held her. She does not ask even his # 
permission to remain at home, till her child were old enough to 
be left with the priest. 

in all relating to Samuel, Elkanah was completely secondary. 
Even in the bullocks, flowers, and wine, provided for the offering, 
it was Hannah who brought and offered them ; Hannah, who 
addressed Eli ; Hannah, who chanted the song of thanksgiving 
to her God ; and Hannah, who devoted her child. The husband 
and father had no more to do with it, than the simple acts of 
acquiescence and approval, which he would not have so unhesi- 
tatingly bestowed, had he not possessed the most perfect confi- 
dence in the judgment and actions of his wife. 

That no severe restrictions as to the time, form, or words of 
prayer, existed in the time of Hannah, is proved by her seeking 
the Temple to pray when it was not the appointed time of 
service, when there was no one there but the high priest and 
herself ; by her speaking in her heart the words which sorrow 
and entreaty dictated, without any regard whatever to instituted 
forms, which, though indispensable for public service and 
national interests, will not give all that is needed to individuals. 

Eli marked the lips of Hannah move, but he heard no voice, foi 
she spake in her heart, and as her heart dictated . And in hei 
song of thanksgiving, though she prayed aloud, still it was from 
the heart alone. 


PERIOD III. HANNAH. 


26 S 


That forms of prayer were not needed in the time of Hannah, 
as they are now, we acknowledge ; and also with all our heart 
and soul do we reverence their institution, and acknowledge 
their full value, both nationally and individually. Many and 
many a one, from incapacity to frame words of prayer, would 
be fearfully and painfully bereft, did they not possess the inva- 
luable treasure of words of prayer, framed by good and learned 
men expressly for their use, and hallowed by long years. We 
are no advocate for the abolishment of established forms ; for 
fully and heartfully we feel their sanctity and value. We would 
only beseech our young sisters to accustom themselves some- 
times in their private hours, to pray and to praise from the 
heart, not always to depend on printed words ; not, indeed, to 
neglect the latter, but to hallow and add to them, by individual 
petitions from individual hearts. Self-knowledge must be their 
first step to such secret prayers; for by self-knowledge alone 
can they discover their natural sins, their greatest temptations, 
their most secret weaknesses, their favorite faults. Self-knowledge 
alone can teach them where they are most likely to fail, and 
where to be unduly elevated ; and display broadly and unsof- 
tened, the true motives of their every action. Self-knowledge 
alone can teach them their true position with regard to eternity 
and God, and for all these things it is, that every individual 
needs individual prayer, wholly and utterly distinct from 
established forms ; not, as we said above, to take the latter’s 
place, but so to be added to them, as to give them life and 
breath. 

The history of’Hannah is all-sufficient for us to be convinced, 
that such individual and heartfelt prayers are not only legal , 
according to the laws, but acceptable to the Lord. No restric- 
tions of man can alter or interfere with that which is divine ; 
an i, therefore, nothing which may be told concerning the ineffi- 
cacy of individual prayer, unless guided by certain rules, forms, 
and words, can do away with the consolation and example 
afforded us by the history of our sweet and gentle ancestress, 
alike in the manner of her prayer and its reply, and in her 
unhesitating, unquestioning, and all-confiding faith. 

We are thus particular, because we would at once remove the 
foul stigma flung by scoffers on our blessed faith, that her female 
children have no power to pray, and are, consequently, soulless 
nonentities before their God ; and bring forward, from the word 
12 


268 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


of God itself, the unanswerable assurance, that woman's prayers 
are heard, and are .acceptable to Him, needing nothing more 
than childlike faith in His power to hear and answer, and a lov- 
ing heart to dictate the imploring words. It is idle for us to say 
that we cannot pray, for we know not how appropriately to 
address the Supreme ; His awful attributes appal us, and prevent 
all connected words. Such may be the sentiments of those who 
keep the Eternal far from them ; but not of Israel, His first-born, 
first-beloved, whose very sins have no power to separate him 
from His God, if he will but repent and believe. “ What nation 
hath God so near them as Israel, in all we call upon Him for ? 
were the precious words of Moses, confirmed by the whole after- 
records of the Bible. — Hagiography, Psalms, Proverbs, Prophets, 
all and every one teem with the same consoling truth, proclaim 
our God as love, the hearer and answerer of prayer, its gracious 
receiver, whenever it comes from the heart , and is offered up in 
faith. “ Call upon me, and I will deliver thee,” is the blessed 
assurance repeated again and again, in different modes of expres- 
sion, in every part of the Bible. It is folly, it is guilt to keep 
away from prayer, under the misleading plea that God is a 
being too pre-eminently holy to be approached. Did we but 
really love Him as He commands, with heart, and soul, and 
might ; did we but trust in Him, as Abraham did, when “ his 
faith was accounted righteousness we should find words enough 
wherewith to pray and praise. Love would bring us to Him, 
believing and rejoicing in that inexhaustible love which would in 
such infinite mercy bend down its reviving rays on us, and lift 
up the wearied spirit, till it found rest on the healing sympathy 
of its all-compassionating God. 

It was thus that Hannah came to Him, loving Him, trusting 
Him, yet more than she loved and confided in her husband, the 
nearest and dearest tie on earth. She did not think herself too 
unworthy to approach and beseech Him, because she knew that 
the Law which she obeyed, and the whole history of her people, 
teemed with His invitations so to do, and His promises to answer. 
She came to Him, because she knew he loved her, and would 
have compassion ; and because she so loved Him, that it was fai 
easier to pour into His gracious ears her silent sorrows than 
breathe them unto man. She came to Him, because she not 
only loved , but believed with such a pure and child-like faith, that 
when the high priest bade her “ Go in peace, and God grant 


PERIOD III. HANNAH, 


269 


thee thy petition,” she returned to her own home so calmly, so 
trustingly, that she “ did eat, and her countenance was no more 
sad — words that convince us how fully she must have believed 
when she prayed, and not only then, but through her lifetime, 
for faith is of no instantaneous growth. It is a plant so foreign 
to this cold, sceptical, questioning world, that it must be nursed 
and tended into life ; it must be a habit , not a feeling ; it must 
attend our every prayer, our every spiritual aspiration, or when 
most needed, it will fail us, and plunge us into gloom. 

But it may be asked in what need we have such perfect and 
constant faith. Hannah’s position will not bear upon us now, 
as we have neither high priest nor Temple, nor any visible mani- 
festations of the Eternal’s interference in human affairs. We 
have not, indeed; but we have still His Word, the Bible, 
wherein so to learn His attributes, His promises, that during our 
captivity we need no more ; for if we disbelieve that Word, no 
priest, no temple, no apparently visible reply, would give us the 
faith we need, and which Hannah proved . 

We need faith to believe that God is love, and our souls 
immortal ; that every precious promise in His word is addressed 
as emphatically to us individually as to us nationally ; to feel 
that there is another and a brighter World, where “ eye hath 
not seen, neither hath ear heard, what He hath prepared for those 
that love Him.” Faith to know that we are individually objects 
of His love and care, as surely as that every blade of glass and 
invisible insect are alike the work of His hand, and the constant 
renewal of that power which at a word called forth creation. 
We need faith, to discern the workings of an eternal Love and 
infinite Goodness in the History of Man, Past and Present ; to 
mark through the evil which is often alone visible, the further- 
ance of that Divine Will and Perfect Good, which runs as a 
silver thread through the darkest web, and links this world with 
heaven — man with God. 

It is for all these things we need Faith : that faith which, 
instead of banishing Reason, welcomes and rejoices in her as her 
Companion and handmaid. Faith may exist without reason ; but 
let reason attempt to exclude faith altogether, let the materialist 
and scoffer laugh and mock at all things which cannot be sub- 
stantially proved, and on his bed of death what shall support 
him ? Let him explain, if he can, birth and death, the begin- 
ning and the end : and then, and not till then, may he contemn 


270 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

and deride those who, contented to be less wise and less inquir* 
ing, walk calmly and happily through this dark valley of earth 
with the angel, Faith, at their side ; sending up their lowly peti- 
tions on his aspiring wings : and calmly sinking, when the tale 
of life is done, secure, through faith’s simple readings of the word 
of God, of that everlasting bliss which awaits him in another 
and purer world. 

With the history of Hannah our Third Period concludes ; and 
from the length with which we have treated each separate notice, 
we have little further to add, save the earnest hope that an 
impartial and unprejudiced study of all that we have brought 
forward, will convince our readers, that no law for the degradation 
and heathenizing the Women of Israel could have had existence 
from the Exodus to the Monarchy ; that therefore all statutes to 
that effect, which may be quoted, must be Human not Divine, 
and cannot be charged to the Law of God, or regarded as 
characteristic of the manners and customs of His people. 

To us, as women, the whole of the Third Period teems with 
guidance and consolation, and, as Women of Israel, must satisfy 
us with the confirmation of our equality and elevation. Shall 
we, then, feel ashamed of the faith which provides such laws, 
and the lineage which counts such characters as Deborah, 
Naomi, and Hannah, amongst our ancestry ? Shall we prefer 
listening to the mistaken zeal which would persuade us that, as 
Hebrew females, we are lowered and degraded, and can only 
become spiritually free by deserting the faith of our ancestors, 
to looking through the Word of God, and, tracing our privileges 
there, make it our glory to reveal them, through our faith and 
conduct to the whole Gentile world ? Oh ! will not every woman 
nerve heart to prove that her religion comes from that God of 
Love and Truth, whose words once spoken will last for ever, 
whose Law once given will know no change ; that she has in 
that faith enough to give her strength to live, and hope to die ; 
aye, and to glory in that blessed Law which cared for woma: 
first, and will care for her for ever ? 


enh of vol. r. 



















































• ' 



































THE 


WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

\ 




BY 

GRACE AGUILAR, 

AUTHOR OB’ “WOMAN’S FRIENDSHIP,” “MOTHER’S RECOMPENSE,” “ VALE Olf 

CEDARS,” ETC. 


7 ' 


VOL. II. 


NEW YORK: 

D APT L ETON AND COMPANY, 

1, 3, and 5 BOND STEEET. 

188 8 .. 






CONTENTS OE VOLUME If 


Michai 

\ ...... 



FOURTH PER-OD. 

THE MONARCHY. 

CHAPTER I. 

Abigail 

CHAPTER II. 


CHAPTER III. 

Wise Woman of Tekoah. — Woman of Abel. — Rizpah. — Prophet’a 


Widow 


The Shunammite 

CHAPTER IV. 


CHAPTER V. 

Little Israelitish Maid. — Huldah ....... 67 

FIFTH PERIOD. 

BABYLONIAN CAPTIVITY. 

CHAPTER I. 

The Captivity. — Review of the Book of Ezra. — Suggestions as to 

the Identity of the Ahasuerus of Scripture. — Choice of Esther 80 


Estliei continued 

CHAPTER n. 

Esther concluded 

CHAPTER III. 


CHAPTER iv. 

Review of Events narrated in Ezra and Nehemiah . . .119 


SIXTH PERIOD. 

CONTINUANCE OF THE SECOND TEMPLE. 

PA»> 

CHAPTER I. 

Review of the Jewish History, from the Return from Babylon to 

the Appeal of Hyrcanus and Aristo'bulus to Pompey . 127 

CHAPTER II. 

From the Appeal to Pompey to the Death of Herod . . 139 

CHAPTER III. 

From the Death of Herod to the War 1 47 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Martyr-Mother L55 

CHAPTER V. 

Alexandra 167 

CHAPTER VI. 

Mariamne 187 

CHAPTER VII. 

Mariamne continued • . . . 203 

CHAPTER VIII. 

Mariamne continued 217 

CHAPTER IX. 

Mariamne concluded — Alexandra — Salome . . . .231 

CHAPTER x. 

Helena — Berenice 248 

CHAPTER XI. 

General Remarks 268 

SEVENTH PERIOD. 

WOMEN OF ISRAEL IN THE PRESENT, AS INFLUENCED BY THE PAST. 

CHAPTER I. 

The War and Dispersion. — Thoughts on the Talmnd . . . 277 

chapter n. 

Talmudic Ordinances and Tales 289 

chapter in. 

Effects of Dispeision.-Gene ral Remarks ..... 303 


T11E WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


FOURTH PERIOD. 


CHAPTER I. 

ESTABLISHMENT • 0 F THE MONARCHY. PATRI« 

OTISM OF THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. MIC IIAL. 

We are now come to an important change in the history of 
Israel ; the first step to her downfall, and the first opening for 
the fearful flood of misery and crime which nationally and 
individually deluged J udea. We allude to the election of an 
earthly king, and the establishment of a temporal monarchy. 
In vain the prophet Samuel reasoned and implored, beseeching 
them to rest contented with the government already established ; 
and in the deepest humility of spirit prayed unto the Lord. 
“ Hearken unto the voice of the people, in all that they say unto 
thee,* was the gracious answer, “for they have not rejected thee, 
but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” 
Awful words, and most awfully fulfilled ! The infinite mercy 
of Israel’s God would not reject His people, though they had 
rejected Him ; but in the very gratification of their desire to 
have a king they received their chastisement; a chastisement 
not of a year’s or a century’s continuance, but lasting through 
ages and ages of crime, misery, expulsion, persecution, and 
working against unhappy Israel even at this present day. 

But the Eternal would not expose them to these terrible 
effects of their own choice without warning, and by the mouth 
of Samuel He told them of all the evils they would experience 
under earthly kings, and that they w r ould cry out in their distress 
unto the Lord, and then He would not hear them ; but still 
they persisted in the very face of that prophetical word. God 
granted indeed their request. The people, with the wildest 


8 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


rejoicings, received a king, and beheld a monarchy established ; 
but the awful effects thence ensuing ought to convince us, that 
the granting our requests is not always the evidence of the 
Lord’s love and approbation. Better, far better, to rest in Him, 
and submit to His will, however it may interfere with our own 
short-sighted wishes, than persist in their accomplishment, and 
so weary our Father in heaven with repinings and complaints, 
as to make Him grant that in anger, which in love He would 
refuse. We should, indeed, bring before Him all our wishes, 
through the blessed medium of prayer ; but such prayers should 
ever be coupled with the entreaty for grace to meet his will, what- 
ever it may be ; to submit unmurmuringly to His decision ; and 
still to realize His love, however He may ordain disappointment. 
To such prayers we are assured, through the promises of Hi? 
Word, that he will deign to reply ; but for the mere entreaty 
for the gratification of earthly wishes, the proneness to complain 
and repine at the faintest semblance of denial, oh ! let us remem- 
ber the misery hurled upon Israel by the granting their request 
for a king, and take warning. It is thus that, even in our 
history, the Word of God may instruct and guide us, and give 
us lessons for daily life and individual petitions from national 
examples. 

The monarchy of Israel lasted for the period of four hundred 
and fifty years, and thus presents us with a fourth division of our 
subject ; the social and domestic condition of the Women of 
Israel during its continuance being a remarkable proof for or 
against our argument, that no law transmitted to us by Moses 
commanded our degradation. By a careful study of their 
positions, as displayed in the various sketches of female character 
found in the historic books, we shall be able at least to discover 
if indeed there were any human laws or customs at work coun- 
teracting the elevating and spiritualizing influence of the statutes 
for woman’s benefit enjoined by Moses. The fearful crimes, and 
awful state of anarchy and rebellion, during the kingdom, will 
not indeed allow us either the variety or the completeness of 
female characters, as displayed in our first and third periods ; 
nor shall we find such beautiful lessons guiding us individually ; 
•till, in the brief sketches brought before us, there is sufficient 
for our conviction that, as women of Israel, we are as elevated 
and spiritualized as the most exacting nations can require ; and 
that if we are degraded, socially and individually, in the mind of 


PERIOD IV. THE MONARCHY. 


9 


any man, bearing the honored name of Jew, it is in direct con- 
tradiction to the laws of God, and completely opposed to the 
practice of Judaism, even in that period when her followers were 
sunk to the lowest ebb of misery and sin. 

The establishment of the kingdom had in all probability less 
influence on the social position of the Hebrew women than on 
any other class, until the universal wickedness spread even to 
them, and caused the prophetical denunciations against their 
sins, as distinct from those of man. The first mention of 
women in this period, is their coming forth from all the cities of 
Israel, singing and dancing, to meet King Saul, after the 
destruction of Goliath by David, with tabrets, with joy, and with 
instruments of music ; evidently a voluntary act, and marking 
their social position to have been one of perfect freedom, and 
also of some influence, else their ascribing to David the glory of 
slaying his ten thousands, and Saul only his thousands, would 
not have caused the king so much disturbance. We learn too, 
from this account, that the gifts of song and the dance, and play- 
ing upon divers instruments, had not at all degenerated in the 
Israelitish women since the time of Miriam, when they echoed 
back Moses’s song of praise. The skill in these accomplishments 
argues an education both polished and refined, very superior to 
the instruction accorded to the women of contemporary nations. 
Examples of intellect and judgment we have had already, and 
shall have again ; therefore it is also clear that their education 
was not confined to mere superficial accomplishment, which is 
often supposed the only instruction necessary for woman. The 
song, and dance, and knowledge of musical instruments, were 
but a small portion of the female Hebrew’s acquirements ; but 
that they are expressly named more than once in the Word of 
God, should encourage us alike in their cultivation and in their 
enjoyment, granted as sources of recreation, of innocent pleasure, 
and yet more as the means of sacred rejoicing. To abuse them, 
by making them sources of envy and display, and all kinds of 
ill-feeling, or to undervalue and despise them as snares and 
foolishness, must both alike be wrong, and prevent the perfec- 
tion of the heart towards God. He endowed us not with talents 
to lie unused, but to make others happy, and to increase our 
own innocent and healthful resources, and create an ever-gush- 
ing spring of gratitude towards Him. 

Nor did the women of Israel refrain from national rejoicing 


10 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


They were not confined to their own narrow spheres, feeling no 
interest beyond. They did not smile to scorn the holy feeling 
of patriotism, which should awaken every female heart to the 
joys and griefs, triumphs and defeats of her country, as if they 
were her own. They encouraged, they rejoiced in it ; and its 
very possession and display proves their equality with man as 
citizens of Israel, and children of the Lord. We never find 
patriotism in a degraded position — the slave knows not even its 
name, much less the glow, the enthusiasm with which it lights 
up our being. It is in itself a refining and spiritual principle, 
intimately connected with our higher selves. To the Israelites 
it must have been yet more powerful than to any other nation, 
for their beautiful land was the direct gift of God ; and bearing 
every sabbatical year miraculous witness of His unceasing love, 
in permitting the sainted earth to give forth of itself sufficient 
for the holy people, that they might not have the temptation 
of necessity to disobey their law. Israel in captivity may not 
indeed be enabled to realize the same feeling of amor patrice as 
Israel in Judea; yet let us not forget that we are exiles, and 
sometimes cast a longing look of lingering love to that land 
which is still ours, and which will once again, at the mandate 
of the Lord, spring up in renewed and renovated loveliness, to 
welcome home the weary wanderers “ from the north, and from 
the south, and from the east, and from the west.” Did we 
sometimes think of Judea as our own land, we should not 
regard our destined return to Jerusalem either with direct 
unbelief, or as a change from the creature comforts which we 
may be enjoying in our captivity, not at all to be desired. 
Daily is the prayer for the rebuilding of Jerusalem offered up ; 
yet how very many- are those who, while they would think the 
omission of that petition almost sin, yet so little enter into its 
spirit, as to shrink from even the thought of returning unto our 
own most holy land ! 

Nor does this feeling towards Jerusalem interfere with the 
emotions which we all ought to experience towards the lands 
of our adoption — “ Seek the peace of the city (or land) whither 
I have caused you to be carried away captives,” the Lord Him- 
self proclaimed through His prophet Jeremiah, “ and pray unto 
the Lord for it ; for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.” 
What injunction can be stronger or more solemii than these 
wcrds, directing even our prayers, and thus at once reproving 


PERIOD IV. MICHAL. 


II 


die scoffers who scorn the idea of individual petitions benefiting 
a nation ? That Israel is deeply susceptible of a love of country 
distinct from the love borne towards Judea, is beautifully and 
forcibly exemplified in the history of her expulsion from Spain, 
and of her secret existence there in the very midst of danger, 
and death if discovered, when so many other lands offered a 
secure retreat. And shall not we, respected and at peace as we 
are, in free and happy England, encourage this refined and 
holy feeling, and “ pray unto the Lord for it,” as for our own 
bright land? By woman, even more than man, should this 
emotion be experienced — for how heavy would be her burden, 
if the peace of home were liable to be disturbed. Let us then re- 
member our privileges and duties as women of Israel, and bid our 
own hearts to glow with patriotism, alike in mourning fondness 
for Judea, as in grateful and prayerful affection for the lands 
blessing the exile with liberty and rest ; that we may uncon- 
sciously imbue the hearts of our sons with the same elevating 
and purifying emotions, and behold them, while glorying in the 
sacred name they bear, as heritors and future denizens of the 
land of promise, ever ready to stand forward as able citizens 
and valiant defenders of their adopted homes. 

In confirmation of our theory, that in the earlier history of 
Israel one wife was the natural and legal position of woman, we 
find that Saul had no more — or more than the one would have 
been specified, as in the case of the other kings. He had two 
daughters, Merab and Michal. Of the former, little is mentioned ; 
except that she it was, who was the first offered to David as an 
incitement to fight for Saul ; who, already envious and malig- 
nant, thought to slay the valiant youth by the hands of the 
Philistines, and thus save himself all shame. But the Lord was 
with David, and had departed from Saul ; and the young man 
must evidently have won the promised reward, for we read in 
Holy Writ, “It came to pass at the time when Merab should 
have been given to David, that she was given unto Adriel the 
Meholathite to wife;” a course of acting exactly such as we 
should expect from the capricious tyrant which Saul had 
become. Still David, with a single-mindedness and simple 
confidence only found in early youth, and in a youth of virtue, 
seems to have trusted and fought again ; and this time, evidently 
with so much settled foresight and determination, that we might 
almost infer that the love which Michal, Saul’s second daughter, 


12 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


bora towards Dav.d was fully returned, and so inspired the 
dangerous expedition on which he ventured. 

We have not very much of Michal, nor any particularly 
pleasing portraiture of character, yet our history will not be com- 
plete without noticing all that is recorded concerning her. The 
deep love that in her youth she appears to have borne David, 
must have exposed her many times to an intensity of suffering 
which throws a degree of interest around her, and enlists us 
more warmly in her favor than we could otherwise have been. 
Jonathan’s faithful friendship for David always receives the meed 
of our admiration, the more so from his being the son of his 
deadliest foe. The love borne towards him by the daughter of 
Saul, must have been a yet stronger emotion ; and in conse- 
quence subjected Michal to still deeper suffering. It does not 
appear that Merab loved David ; and therefore Michal’s first suf- 
fering must have been excited by beholding him destined for 
another who loved him not ; while she who had given him the 
first freshness and fervor of her affections was set aside and dis- 
regarded. Even when this sorrow was removed by the union 
of Merab with Adriel, and her love being reported to her father 
it pleased him as the means of ensnaring David, how little con- 
fidence could she have placed in her father’s promise, when she 
remembered how he had already deceived ! Her fears of Saul’s 
caprice were, however, at this time without foundation. She 
became the wife of David, whom, we are told, she continued to 
love as fondly after marriage as before. In her case it was not 
“ because the current of true love never will run smooth” .that 
she loved him, and consequently that, when the desired happi- 
ness was obtained, its glow dissolved. Peace indeed, and rest 
from anxiety, she had not, even when the wife of David. The 
love she bore him must continually have exposed her to terror 
for his safety, for her father “ grew yet the more afraid of David,” 
and repeatedly gave orders that he should be slain ; fortunately, 
he had taken his son Jonathan into his confidence, and the 
young man boldly and firmly stood forward in his friend’s 
defence, venturing even to call the king’s desired deed a sin 
against David, who had ever done his duty alike to Saul and to 
his country. For a time his pleadings succeeded, and as David 
was again with Saul, as in times past, Michal’s terror might have 
tn a degree subsided, and the heart alike of the daughter and 
the wife been a brief while at peace. But, again, there was 


PERIOD IV. M1CHAL. 


13 


war with the Philistines : and David, true to his heroic charac- 
ter, went out and fought with them, and slew them with such 
great slaughter that thev fled from him : yet how might Michal 
rejoice in the glorious heroism of her husband, when his deeds 
( of valor ever recalled the king’s deadly hatred, and exposed him 
to renewed peril ? Even in the very act of charming, by his 
exquisite skill on the harp, the evil spirit from the monarch’s 
heart, Saul flung the javelin which he had in his hand with such 
fierce and deadly aim, that David only escaped instar t death by 
starting aside, and the instrument struck the wall. lie fled 
from the royal presence to his own home, revealing by his sud- 
den return the danger he had incurred, and recalling all Michal’s 
fears. Nor was the danger over. Messengers sent to David’s 
house Co watch and slay him in the morning, at once roused the 
terror and the energy of his devoted wife. David was so uni- 
versally beloved, that information of the king’s intentions towards 
him had in all probability been transmitted to Michal by the 
messengers themselves, or through the agency of Jonathan, who, 
like his sister, was ever on the alert for David’s preservation. In 
whatever way she received tidings of his danger, it is certain 
that she it was whose ' Aergy and judgment saved him ; arous- 
ing him “ to save thy F.e to-night, else to-morrow thou wilt be 
slain.” 

We find neither complaint nor bewailing on the part of Michal, 
though she was parting from her husband for an indefinite 
period, during which time suffering and horror of every descrip- 
tion might assail both him and her ; that she felt, even to anguish, 
we must believe, for we have been twice told that she “ loved 
David.” And those who love, can alone have an adequate idea 
of all that parting must have been ; yet feeling itself succumbed 
before the energy of will, which only sought his preservation, 
scarcely allowing time even for words of kindness or one fare- 
well embrace. “ She let him down through a window, and he 
went, and fled, and escaped and Michal, not daring to give 
way to emotion, busied herself in carrying out her stratagem 
to obtain sufficient time for his escape, ere he was pursued. She 
laid an image in David’s bed, and put a pillow of goat’s hair for 
his bolster, and covered it with a cloth ; and when the morning 
came, and Saul’s messengers demanded David, she calmly told 
them he was sick ; and with that information they evidently 
returned to their sovereign, probably not at all sorry that David 


14 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


was unable to accompany them. The wrath of the king, how* 
ever, was not to be turned aside; he commanded them — • 
“ Bring him up to me in the bed, that I may slay him.” And, 
again proceeding to his house, the deceit was discovered, and 
Michal herself brought before her father. 

“ Wherefore hast thou deceived me so,” he demanded, “ and 
sent away mine enemy that he has escaped?” And Michal 
answered Saul, “ He said unto me, Let me go ; why should I 
kill thee ?” an answer which, though by the previous narrative 
not strictly true, was perhaps allowable from the dangerous and 
difficult position in which Michal was placed. To avow the 
share she had in his escape, would only have aggravated her 
father’s anger ; and though the enemy and persecutor of her 
innocent husband, yet Saul was still her father ; and Michal, 
who nad, no doubt, been brought up in the peculiarly strict and 
reverential feelings of Hebrew children to their parents, might 
not have felt justified in exciting her father’s wrath towards 
herself, more than David’s escape had already done. The 
answer appears to have satisfied Saul so far as his daughter 
was concerned ; but the search and pursuit after David con- 
tinued unabated. 

During the immediate pressure of danger, the mind and 
heart are supported by their own energy ; and we know not 
how fearfully the nerves have been overstrained till the period 
of action is past, and we can only be still and endure. How 
sadly this must have been the case with Michal we may well 
imagine, when we remember that, from the hour of his escape 
by her means until he was established in the sovereignty of 
Israel, an interval of five or six years, she never looked on the 
husband of her love again. Month after month, year after 
year, if she heard of him at all, it must have been still as a 
wanderer flying from place to place, at the imminent risk of his 
life, either from the emissaries of Saul, or from the treachery 
and spite of the various courts in which he was compelled to 
take a refuge. At one time even the inmate of caves and 
deserts — at another forced to feign madness — often in want of 
actual food and other necessaries of daily life ; and yet more 
than these ; — Michal was a woman, and a loving woman ; and 
though the custom of marrying many wives was not illegal 
in Judea, and not felt as it would be now, we have already 
eeen that it was productive of sometimes sorrow and vexation ; 


PERIOD IV . MICHAL. 


15 


and to the absent and the loving Michal, the thought that 
David had found others to supply her place, and that therefore 
he could not need or think of her as she did of him, must have 
been fraught with no little degree of bitterness greatly aggra- 
vating the pang of separation. 

Nor was this all. We are told (1 Sam. xxv. 4), “ that Saul 
had given Michal his daughter, David’s wife, to Phalti, the son 
of Laish,” an act of capricious tyranny in direct disobedience to 
the laws of Israel. A divorce might permit a woman to 
become the wife of another man, but no divorce whatever had 
taken place between David and Michal ; and consequently 
Saul’s action must only have proceeded from that determined 
persecution of the Lord’s Anointed, which urged him to annoy 
him in every possible way, even if to do so occasioned disobe* 
dience to the law. That Michal herself could ever have volun- 
tarily acquiesced, when we know how “ she loved David,” is 
neither possible nor probable. Saul had become a tyrant even 
to his own family ; and the same man who could cast a javelin 
at his noble son Jonathan, with the hope to slay him, after 
heaping on him all manner of abuse, only because of his love 
for, and defence of David, would not scruple to outrage every 
feeling of his daughter, and compel her, by the most iniquitous 
force, to annul her brief period of connexion with David, and 
become the wife of another. 

That Michal was the unhappy sufferer , not the agent in 
these nefarious and most illegal proceedings, is clearly evident 
rom two circumstances. In the first place, we are expressly 
told, “ that Saul gave Michal his daughter,” &c. Her name, 
as agent is not mentioned, whence we infer that it was her 
father’s tyranny, against which a weak and defenceless woman 
had no power to rebel. In the second, it is clearly demon- 
strable that she herself was blameless, else would not David 
have made her restoration to himself one of the very first 
proceedings of his regal power. Had there been even the sem- 
blance of a divorce, he could not have done this, the law 
expressly forbidding it ; but the iniquitous tyranny of Saul, in 
this outrage to his child, completely justified David’s after-pro- 
ceedings. He would not visit on a blameless child the sins of a 
guilty father, by leaving her in a position to which parental 
tyranny had assigned her ; but recalled her to his heart and to 
his home, at the very time when, had his noble spirit retained 


to THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

any spark of enmity towards the house of Saul, he might, and 
with some appearance of justice, have permitted her to remain 
neglected and uncared for, in the equivocal station which, as no 
divorce had taken place between her and himself, she must una- 
voidably have occupied in Phalti’s house. 

The next mention we have of Michal after her restoration to 
David, is indicative of a feeling very contrary to that which at 
first attracted us towards her, and displays an imperfection of 
character which we might perhaps expect from the daughter of 
Saul, but certainly not from the wife of David. 

For the last twenty years, the ark of God had remained in 
Kirjath Jearim, in the house of Abinadab, whose son, Eleazer, 
had been sanctified to keep it. Through all the troubles of the 
reign of Saul it had quietly remained there; no inclination 
having been demonstrated by either king or subjects to remove 
it, and so arguing an indifference to its sacred presence, only too 
fully borne out by the many illegal acts of Saul. David could 
not feel this indifference. The ark of God was to him so inex- 
pressibly sacred, that his heart yearned for its holy influence in 
the city where he dwelt ; and therefore every preparation was 
made for conducting it to Hebron with all befitting sanctity and 
honor. The fear, however, excited by the smiting of Uzzah for 
his irreverence, urged his turning it aside from the direct road 
to the city, and bringing it into the house of Obed-edom, the 
Gittite. There it abode three months ; and the Lord so 
blessed Obed-edom, and all his household, that David again 
coveted its presence in his own city, believing with a child-like 
and loving faith that the presence of the Lord dwelt there, and 
would bless all those who sought to do him reverence and 
honor. “ So David went and brought up the ark of God from 
the house of Obed-edom, to the city of David, with gladness.” 

It was a very jubilee of rejoicing to the inmates of Hebron. 
Trumpets and holy songs marked its progress, and every six 
paces sacrifices of oxen and fathngs were offered to the Lord , 
and the king himself, disrobed of all regal ornaments, and 
attired simply in a linen ephod as one of the inferior priests, join- 
ed with his whole heart in the solemn rejoicing, by leaping and 
dancing before the Lord. The mode of this holy rejoicing may 
read strangely to our refined ears ; but the song and the dance 
were ever the natural symbols of rejoicing in Israel. Amuse- 
ments, which are by many deemed so profane as to be excluded 


PERIOD IV. MIC HAL. 


17 


from all professors of religion, were, in Judea and by the 
chosen people of God, not only allowed, but sanctified and 
hallowed, by their intimate association with the service of the 
Lord. 

“ And as the ark came into the city of David, Michal, Saul’s 
daughter, looked through a window, and saw the king rejoicing, 
&c. And she despised him in her heart.” Despised him ! 
she who had once so loved him ? How could contempt exist 
with love ? Michal was a very woman ; it was not the leaping 
and dancing she despised, but that King David should, without 
any semblance of royalty or state, clothed in the lowly garments 
of an inferior priest, mingle with the crowds, and become for 
the time as one of them. We know that such were her feel- 
ings by her scornful address to the king, when on the conclusion 
of the burnt-offerings and peace-offerings David returned to bless 
his household, and was met by Michal, eager to give vent to her 
contempt. “ How glorious was the king of Israel to-day, who 
uncovered himself (meaning removed the coverings of royalty) 
in the eyes of the lowest of his servants, even as one of the vain 
fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself,” alluding to the lowest 
class of the. people, who were often compelled to remove their 
long upper garment, lest it should hinder them in their work. 
“And David said unto Michal, It was before the Lord, which 
chose me before thy father, and before all his house, to appoint 
me ruler over the people of the Lord, over Israel : and there- 
fore will I rejoice before the Lord. And I will yet be moro 
vile than thus, and be base in my own sight : and (yet more) 
of the maidservants of which thou hast spoken, shall I be had in 
honor ;” a calm yet emphatic reproof, bringing forcibly before 
her the folly of her contempt. What were the trappings of 
state, the distinction of ranks, before the Eternal ? In His sight 
king and serf, prince and peasant, were the same, judged only 
by the rendering of the heart towards Him, by their zeal or 
indifference in His service. It was the Lord who had made 
David what he was, and therefore what was he more in His 
sight than the lowest of his subjects? Nor did he rejoice 
merely from individual thanksgiving. It was the purest joy to 
a heart like David’s, that to him the blessed privilege was 
granted of bringing the ark of the Lord into his city ; a proof 
that the Eternal deigned to bless the city of David with His 


18 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


immediate presence, and must in itself have created not oi.iy 
individual, but national rejoicing. 

The allusion to his having been chosen in lieu of Michal’a 
father, and all his house, cannot in any way be regarded as at- 
.inkind and uncalled-for reproach from David to his wife. Tne 
extent of the love he bore her, we infer not only from the fact of 
his recalling her, but from his making her restoration an absolute 
condition with Abner ere ne would accept that warriors 
allegiance. Abner was a person of the greatest consequence in 
Israel, alike from his near connexion with the family of Saul, his 
great influence with the people, and his skill and courage as a 
warrior. To obtain his subjection and allegiance was of almost 
vital importance to the popularity of David ; yet did that 
monarch refuse to receive him, even at the risk of sacrificing 
his offered submission, unless he would bring him back his wife. 

No feeling, therefore, actuated him towards Michal as Saul’s 
daughter. Nor would a syllable of reproach have escaped his 
lips concerning her parentage, had he not been roused to just 
indignation, by her reproaching him with his zeal in the service 
of his God. Nothing is more painful, or more difficult to be 
borne with patience, than a contemptuous attack on our zeal in 
devotion, or on our ardent wish to serve the Lord, either in 
glorifying him, or doing good to our fellow-creatures ; and the 
nearer and dearer the person who utters such reproach, the more 
exquisitely painful is it to bear. Michal does not appear to have 
been a religious woman. In no part of her history can we trace 
the workings of that secret, yet ever-acting piety, which 
characterized so many of her countrywomen. Her very love foi 
David would seem to have been excited, not so much from his 
beautiful and unwavering piety, but from the dazzling beauty 
and chivaltic qualities which had so distinguished him. Had 
she been religious, her joy and thanksgiving that the ark of her 
God was permitted to abide in her husband’s city would have 
occupied her mind, to the exclusion of every petty and con- 
temptuous feeling. Had she loved David for those spiritual 
qualities which had so gained him the loving favor of the 
Lord, delight and admiration that to him this privilege was 
accorded, must utterly have prevented all thought and emotion 
but veneration and rejoicing ; but that it was merely exterior 
beauty and brilliant qualities which had attracted her, is clear lv 


PERIOD IV. MICHAL. 


19 


evident from the scornful contempt with which she regarded him, 
when these were laid aside for the moment, and naught could 
find entrance into the heart of David, but rejoicing, thankfulness, 
and holy zeal 

David w r as satisfied with administering a just reproof ; but the 
Lord was not : and from the punishment which befel Michal, we 
must infer that her sin was greater than at a first perusal it may 
seem. That it was not contempt of David only which she felt, 
but contempt of the holy service in which he was engaged ; and 
therefore was it “ that Michal the daughter of Saul had no child 
unto the day of her death not only debarred from having 
children of her own, but even deprived by a subsequent act of 
the Eternal’s justice of the five she had acquired by adoption. 
In 2 Sam. xxi., we find mention of a famine in Israel, which was 
to arouse David to the fact that all the awful actions of Saul and 
his bloody house were not yet atoned, and reparation to 
the Gibeonites still to be made. Seven of Saul’s nearest 
descendants they demanded should be delivered up to them, in 
lieu of either gold or silver, or even execution on the part of 
Israel’s king. David, guided by the Lord, delivered up in 
consequence two of Saul’s remaining sons, and his five 
grandsons, which Merab his eldest daughter had borne to her 
husband Adriel, and whom Holy Writ informs us, “ Michal had 
brought up for Adriel the son of Barzillai the Meholathite.” 

Thus was she doubly childless, and by a bereavement most 
awful in its kind ; yet the very choice of these might not only 
be for justice done to the Gibeonites, but to work out still more 
fully the Eternal’s anger against Michal. The same spirit which 
had incited her to scorn His holy service, might have prompted 
the very adoption of these children in proud defiance to his 
almighty will. Children of her own she might be restrained 
from having, but who or what was to prevent her adopting the 
children of her sister, and making them in every respect her 
own ? If such were in truth her incitement to their adoption 
(and we only suppose it from an impartial consideration of her 
character), how fearfully must she have been taught the sinful 
and miserable vanity of striving with the Lord ! How much 
better it would have been to have humbled herself in penitence 
and prayer before Him, acknowledging the justice of His first 
sentence of childishness, and endeavoring so to reform her heart 
and life, as not only to become more worthy of her husband’* 


20 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


love, but to regain the loving mercy of the Lord ; not by a 
change in His decree, for that was immutable as Himself, but 
by the spiritual calm and blessedness which He grants to all 
who love Him. Had she done so, she might have been 
happier, notwithstanding her having no child, than she had 
ever been before ; but of such conduct we have no trace. She 
ooked only to human means for the acquirement of happiness, 
and those proved indeed “ the reed wheron if a man lean, it will 
go into his hand and pierce it.” 

The mention of her having brought up the sons of Adriel, is 
the last notice which we have of Michal. Her character is not 
one to linger on with either pleasure or admiration, and there- 
fore we cannot regret that we have reached its close. The only 
pleasing trait about her is her love for David ; and that he 
truly loved her, endows her with an interest scarcely her own. 
Nor can we find any part of either her history or character to 
hold up as an example. A warning indeed it presents us, and 
one which, alas ! but too many of us need. How often does 
silent and unavowed, yet still realized contempt, fill the human 
heart, when w T e witness an outpouring of zeal, to which our own 
cold unexcitable natures never can attain ! How frequently do 
we condemn enthusiasm as romantic folly, only because to us it 
is incomprehensible ; and, an evil still worse, how ofteu do wo 
secretly scorn the religion of those whose outward forms may 
appear to us childish, or unfounded, and not needed to bring up 
our prayers before the Lord ! How many times do we contemn 
those who in the merest trifle differ from that standard of holi 
ness which we may have set up for ourselves, and refuse to 
believe in their sincerity, because its semblance is unlike orr 
own. And in scorn and disdain towards those who serve the 
Lord with those forms which their conscience approves and dic- 
tates, — oh ! let 13 beware, lest contempt extend to the service 
as well as to the servers — to the religion as well as to the 
forms. This was the sin of Michal. For this the Lord Him- 
self chastised her ; and that she was chastised, is an unerring 
proof to us how deeply displeasing in the sight of the Eternal 
is contempt for holy things. Let us then look with more 
charity on the mere outward forms of our brethren, however 
they may differ from our own preconceived opinions. Let us 
not condemn their zeal, or be too hasty in pronouncing enthusi- 
asm the service of the lip and not of the heart. If we look 


PERIOD IV. ABIGAIL. 


21 


well within ourselves to know what may be lurking there, what 
may need rooting out (even if to do so painfully severs the 
habits and prejudices of years), to discover if our own hearts and 
spirits be perfect with our God, we shall have little time for 
contempt towards the religious observances of others, and be thus 
effectually shielded from following in the mistaken steps of 
Michal, and like her incurring the wrath and chastisement of tie 
Lord. 


CHAPTER II. 

ABIGAIL. 

Before commencing our next biographical sketch, we would 
call our readers’ attention to one verse contained in the history 
we have just completed, as it so strikingly confirms our often- 
repeated assertion, that in the religion of God the women of 
Israel were privileged to join in all religious ceremonies, and to 
receive the blessings of king or priest equally with the men. 

We have already noticed the procession of the Ark into 
Hebron, the sacrifices and shoutings and soundings of the 
trumpets ; and that when they had brought in the Ark of the 
Lord, and set it in its place in the midst of the Tabernacle that 
David had pitched for it — and David had sacrificed burnt offer- 
ings and peace offerings before the Lord — as soon as he had 
made an end of the offerings, he blessed the people in the name 
of the Lord of Hosts. And he dealt among all the people, even 
among the whole multitude of Israel, as well to the women as 
the men, “ to every one a cake of bread, a good piece of flesh, 
and a flagon of wine ; so all the people departed, every one to 
his house.” 

In most public rejoicings, it is generally thought sufficient to 
provide for families not for individuals. Tn Israel, we find every 
jne sent away, with the means of not only feasting for the day, 
Dut for some days afterwards. And by the particular mention 


22 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


of women as well as men, we see that they were not onlv 
witnesses of the sacred procession and of the sacrifices, but were 
singled out by the king as receivers, alike of his blessing and his 
bounty. This is but a trifling circumstance in itself ; yet every 
verse in the Word of God tending to make manifest the equality 
of the Hebrew females, their peculiar and glorious privileges as 
women of Israel, is of no small importance. According even to 
the ultra orthodox, the law and its traditionary explanation 
must have been in force, both in theory and practice, during 
the monarchy of Israel ; and if we can find no evidence there 
of the slavery and ignorance of woman, it is clear that the laws 
which are said to command these things have no foundation in 
Judaism. 

We now come to a character which proves the dignity and 
elevation of the Israelitish woman most completely. There was 
a man in Maon, whose possessions were in Carmel ; and the 
man was very great, and he had three thousand sheep, and a thou- 
sand goats. His name was Nabal, of the house of Caleb, 
churlish in his disposition, and evil in his doings. He had 
a wife named Abigail, of whom we are expressly told by the 
Sacred Historian, that “ she was a woman of good understand- 
ing and of a beautiful countenance.” How such a superior per- 
son could ever have become the wife of the churlish Nabal, we 
might be at a loss to discover, did we not feel with a quaint old 
chronicler, that love of wealth was as likely to be found in 
ancient Israel as in other nations, and that Nabal’s wealth had 
in consequence been a greater attraction in the eyes of A bigail’s 
father than the domestic happiness of his child, which happi- 
ness an evil temper must inevitably have destroyed ; the beauty 
and the very gifts of Abigail were likely to have won Nabal’a 
love ; for affection and even kindness may be found in churlish 
dispositions, though neither can be pleasantly demonstrated. 
Perfect freedom and equality Abigail evidently enjoyed in her 
husband’s house ; but the want of companionship for her supe- 
rior understanding, the constant annoyances which Nabal’s 
temper must have occasioned her, even if not shown to herself, 
displayed broadly in her household and tc all who sought 
fa/ors or even common courtesy at his hand, must have pain- 
fully embittered her domestic life. Still we do not find that 
either her energy or happy temper sank under it, as would haoe 
been the case with any but a very superior mind. Nothing i? 


PERIOD IV. ABIGAIL. 


28 


so infectious as an evil temper. The strongest control, the mos 
enduring and everacting piety, the most determined resolutioi 
to bear and forbear, to love and to forgive, however often pained 
or annoyed ; all these must be experienced and practised bv i. 
wife, if the evil temper of her husband really fails to sour her? 
Some meek gentle dispositions and unwavering sweetness of 
temper, may indeed stand the torrent of churlishness uninjured ; 
but in these, though the temper does not fail, health and energy 
both succumb, and the most lasting misery is the conse- 
quence. Abigail evidently did not belong to this latter class, or 
she could not have acted in an emergency of terror as we find 
she did. 

The confusion and misery reigning in Judea, from the Lord’s 
rejection of Saul until his death, do not appear to have pene- 
trated as far as Carmel, so as to interfere with the usual rural 
employments of the Israelites. Rumors of the contest between 
Saul and David, of the cruelties of the former and troubles of 
the latter, had no doubt spread far and near, and had enlisted 
the popular feelings in favor of the noble and persecuted David. 
It was sheep-shearing time, and all Nabal’s flocks were gathered 
together ; while feasting and merry-making diversified the plea- 
sant labor in the household, and displayed the plenteousness 
of Nabal’s stores. Feeling his safety still less secure since the 
recent death of Samuel, David, with his men, had retreated into 
the wilderness of Paran, in the vicinity of Carmel, where Nabal’s 
flocks were fed. Scorning to appropriate to himself the smallest 
portion of the wealth of another, however sorely pressed by 
hunger and privation, David waited till the sheep-shearing, a 
time when most men’s hearts were open towards their poorer 
brethren, and sent messengers to Nabal, bidding them greet him 
in his (David’s) name, and with a winning courtesy which spoke 
well for the gentle and lowly character of the Lord’s anointed, 
ask the food and drink he so imperatively needed. “Peace be 
both to thee, and peace be to thine house, and peace unto 
all that thou hast. And now I have heard that thou hast 
shearers : now thy shepherds which were with us, we hurt them 
not, neither was there aught missing unto them, all the while 
they were in Carmel. Ask thy young men, and they will show 
thee. Wherefore let the young men find favor in thine eyes : for 
we come in a good day : give, I pray thee, whatsoever c )metb 
to thine hand unto thy servants, and to thy son David.” 

13 


24 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


Could any address have been more gentle and respectful, 01 
more calculated to have found an equally conciliating reply! 
Instead of which, we find Nabai, true to his churlish character, 
peremptorily refusing, and scornfully demanding, “ Who is 
David? and who is the son of Jesse? there be many servants 
nowadays that break away every man from his master. Shall 
I then take my bread, and my water, and my flesh, that I have 
killed for my shearers, and give it unto men whom I know not 
whence they be ?” 

He might easily have known, by an inquiry of his own young 
men, to whom David, as a warrant of his truth, had so unhesi- 
tatingly referred him ; but to do so would have inferred a soften- 
ing spirit ; and their information, perhaps, might have compelled 
him to comply with David’s request : therefore he listened only 
to the dictates of his own ill-temper, caring not for the con- 
sequences, or indeed thinking of anything but the peculiar 
pleasure it was to be disobliging and ungrateful ; for from the 
after-words of David, it would seem that he had not only 
restrained his needy followers from taking any part of Nabal’s 
property, but absolutely protected them from the bands of 
marauders which, from the fearful state of the kingdom, prowled 
about Judea. 

The indignation of the young warrior was roused by this surly 
refusal, perhaps to somewhat too great an extent; but David, 
though so truly holy and pious, and perfect in his heart towards 
God, as to be spiritually favored by Him above all his fellows, 
is never portrayed in Holy Writ as anything but a mortal, with 
all the infirmities and feelings of humanity. He was roused not 
only by this ill return for his courtesy, but by the requital of 
evil for good ; and in a moment of anger, he commanded all his 
young men to gird on their swords, and with a troop of four 
hundred equally indignant as himself, marched from the wilder- 
ness in the direction of Nabal’s dwelling, resolved utterly to 
exterminate all that belonged to him ; and no doubt he would 
have done so, had not his wrath been turned aside, and his better 
spirit recalled, by the energy and judgment of a beautiful and 
n >ble-minded woman. 

The high opinion which the superior understanding and 
unwavering temper of Abigail had won her in the minds and 
hearts of her household, is clearly evident from all which fol- 
lowed her husband’s speech. One of the young men to whom 


VERIOD IV. — - ABIGAIL. 25 

David had referred as witnesses of his truth, hastened to his 
mistress, and informed her of all that had occurred. “ Behold, 
David sent messengers out of the wilderness to salute our 
master ; and he railed 1 on them [a forcible description, in a few 
words, of the request and the reply]. But the men were very 
good unto us, and we were not hurt, neither missed we any- 
thing, as long as we were conversant with them, in the fields: 
they were a wall unto us both by night and by day, all the 
while we were with them keeping the sheep. Now therefore 
know and consider what thou wilt do ; for evil is determined 
against our master, and against all his household : for he is sucn 
a man of Belial, that a man cannot speak to him.” 

From these words, we are led to suppose that the young man 
who spoke had seen enough of David, when in the wilderness 
together, to feel well assured that such ungraciousness would be 
severely punished. To attempt to speak to his master he 
knew was impossible, for his words would either have been 
wholly disregarded, or not even allowed to be spoken. We 
see, too, that he was ready and willing to bear witness to 
David’s truth, but his master was such a man of Belial, that he 
dared not speak to him ; yet he was too faithful to allow such a 
danger to fall upon his churlish master unawares, and so sought 
his mistress, whose gentleness and wisdom were in all pro- 
bability the real source of his fidelity, and of that of all his 
companions. 

Abigail lost no time in either lamentations on their hovering 
danger, or in aspersions on her churlish husbanc*. Her active 
and energetic character is clearly displayed in the promptness 
and judgment of her proceedings. She asked no advice, 
demanded no assistance, requiring only the willing help of her 
domestics, and acting on the impulse of the moment as judi- 
ciously and quietly, as if she had months to think and to pre- 
pare. No woman could have done this, unless her understanding 
was ever in exercise, her mind well trained, and her principles 
so regulated as ever to guide her impulses aright. It is only 
when the mind and principles are unregulated that impulses 
are dangerous, and peculiarly liable to mislead. The habit of 
thinking when life is smooth, prepares us for acting promptly 
on an emergency ; and the impulse that we follow springs 
scarcely so much from the feelings of the moment, as from the 


26 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


habit of steady thought to which we have long subjected ow 
minds before. 

Such must have been the character and habits of the wife of 
Nabal, for we read that she “ made haste, and took two 
hundred loaves, two bottles of wine, five sheep ready dressed, 
five measures of parched corn, an hundred clusters of raisins, 
and two hundred cakes of figs, and laid them on asses. And 
she said to her servants, go on before me ; and behold, I come 
after you. But she told not her husband Nabal.” She knew 
it was useless so to do, for she might not hope for his permission, 
and all depended on speed and decision. His safety, her own, 
and that of her whole household, was at stake. It was no 
time for deference to one who would oppose, for the very sake 
of opposition, even if his life were the sacrifice of his foolishness * 
and so mounting her ass, she speedily followed her servants. 
She could not have gone very far, when David and his armed 
men, in alarming fulfilment of her servant’s fears, “ came down 
against her, and she met them.” Dismounting from her ass, 
she hastened to pay him the reverential homage due to him, 
alike as the anointed of the Lord and the destined king 
of Israel ; and kneeling at his feet, addressed him in a strain so 
fraught with the spirit of wisdom and piety, so truly defe- 
rential, without one spark of cringing servility, rising, as she 
proceeded, almost into prophecy, that we can but wonder and 
admire. 

“ Upon me, my lord, upon me let this iniquity be,” she 
answered, wisely seeking to turn David’s anger on herself, that 
by her speedy submission it might be averted; “yet let thine 
handmaid, I pray thee, speak in thine ears, and hear the words 
of thine handmaid. Let not my lord, I pray thee, regard this 
man of Belial, even Nabal : for as his name is, so is he ; Nabal 
is his name, and folly is with him : but I thine handmaid saw 
not the young men of my lord, whom thou didst scud. Now 
therefore, my lord, as the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, 
Beeing the Lord hath withholden thee from coming to shed 
blood, and from avenging thyself with thine own hand, now let 
Ihine enemies, and those that seek evil to my lord, be as Nabal, 
And now this blessing (or gift) which thine handmaid hath 
brought unto my lord, let it be even given unto the young men 
that follow my lord. I pray thee forgive the trespass of thine 


PERIOD IV. ABIGAIL. 


21 


handmaid ; for the Lord will certainly make my lord a sure house > 
because my lord fighteth the battles of the Lord, and evil hath 
not been found in thee all thy days. Yet a man is risen to 
pursue thee, and to seek thy soul : but the soul of my lord shall 
be bound up in the bundle of life with the Lord thy God ; and 
the souls of thine enemies, them shall He sling out as from the 
middle of a sling. And it shall come to pass, when the Lord 
shall have done to my lord according to all the good that He 
hath spoken concerning thee, and shall have appointed thee 
ruler over Israel ; that this shall be no grief unto thee, nor 
olfence of heart unto my lord, either that thou hast shed blood 
causeless, or that my lord hath avenged himself ; but when the 
Lord shall have dealt well with my lord, then remember thine 
handmaid.” 

In not one word of this beautiful address do we find Abigail 
forgetting her own dignity, by that fulsome adulation with 
which a mind of a less elevated grade would have sought to 
disarm David’s wrath. She does not say one word which 
grates upon the mind as flattery. All of greatness, of victory, 
of life which was to befall David, she attributes to the one only 
source, the ordainment and the blessing of the Lord ; and that 
victory only obtained, because it was not his own, but the 
Lord’s battles which he fought. She speaks of his becoming 
king of Israel, of the Eternal accomplishing all that He had 
spoken concerning David as things assured, although at the very 
time she spoke, David was a persecuted exile, with not a place 
but the wild desert in which to lay his head ; and all those who 
loved or showed him kindness, exposed to wrath and even mas- 
sacre at the hand of Saul. What but faith, the unquestioning 
faith springing from the piety of the heart towards God, and the 
intimate knowledge of His ways, could have dictated these 
words ? and could Abigail have attained these things, if in any 
part of the Mosaic law she was denied the privilege of praying 
to the Lord, and studying His words ? No. If woman were 
refused the spiritual privileges granted to her brother man in 
the law of God, there would be no such character as Abigail. 

Not only does she, with prudence and ready wit, deprecate the 
anger of David by taking the trespass against him on herself, 
and asking his forgiveness as if she it was who had offended, but 
she contrives to lessen the offence of Nabal by attributing it not 
to malice or determined enmity, but only to folly, which prevented 


28 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


his being answerable for his own actions, and therefore not worthy 
of David’s further regard. 

There is something singularly noble in Abigail thus taking on 
herself the trespass, and so voluntarily offering herself to bear 
its penalty. It was woman in her noblest and purest character. 
The temper and other evil habits of Nabal must not only have 
prevented all affection towards him, but repeatedly exposed her 
to those petty yet incurable sufferings springing from the surli- 
ness and moroseness of a churlish husband ; yet of these things 
she thinks nothing, only remembering that, as her husband, 
Nabal demanded every exertion and even sacrifice on her part, 
and these without a moment’s hesitation she makes. 

Had not her appeal struck David, even as it strikes ns, it 
would not have so turned aside his purpose. Unselfishness and 
piety, uprightness and honor, he himself so richly possessed, that 
to such in another his heart was literally compelled to respond, 
and wrath banished before them. “ Blessed be the Lord God 
of Israel, which sent thee this day to meet me,” he exclaims, with 
that true unquestioning piety which never knows chance, but 
attributes every event of daily life to the loving guidance of the 
Most High God ; “ and blessed be thy advice, and blessed be 
thou, which hast kept me this day from coming to shed blood, 
and from avenging myself with mine own hand. For in very 
deed, as the Lord God of Israel liveth, which hath kept me back 
from hurting thee, except thou hadst hasted and come to meet 
me, surely by the morning light there had not been one left to 
Nabal.” 

How must the noble heart of Abigail have rejoiced within hei, 
that her energy of purpose and promptness of act had, under the 
blessing of God, been permitted to save so many innocent lives, 
and also checked David in the commission of a great sin ! The 
whole of this scene is so vividly described in Holy Writ, that it 
is rather remarkable that it should never have been taken as the 
subject of a picture, by some of the many illustrators of Scrip- 
ture. A rocky defile of Carmel winding round the side of a hill, 
down which the four hundred armed followers of David in their 
glittering armor might be scattered in and out the rocks, 
except the few which, close beside their leader and the kneeling 
Abigail, marked the foreground. The servants and led asses of 
the wife of Nabal gracefully grouped on the opposite side of the 
irmed men, forming a beautiful contrast, by their peaceful habh 


PERIOD IV.— ABIGAIL. 


29 


foments and alarmed looks, to the fierce and eager countenances 
of the warriors. The extreme beauty of Abigail, the pleading 
look and posture of the suppliant, blending with the modest dig- 
nity of the woman ; the superb countenance and form of the 
still youthful David, varying from indignation to softening admi- 
ration, all might form a combination not unworthy of first-rate 
talent in an artist, more especially when that artist may be found 
at this very day amid the ranks of Israel. 

Courteously and kindly David accepted the proffered gifts of 
Abigail, bidding her “ go up in peace to her house, for he had 
hearkened to her voice and accepted her person.” Meaning 
that he had accepted her as the person who had committed the 
trespass, and so forgiven it. She need be under no further alarm 
on account of her husband. 

Her business thus blessedly accomplished, Abigail loitered not 
on her way, and without further parley returned to her house, 
evidently not having been missed by her husband ; who, while 
death was hovering over his head, was holding a great feast in 
his house like the feast of a king. “ And his heart was merry 
within him,” in all the imbecile and sinful mirth of drunkenness. 
What a contrast to the dignified and exalted character of 
Abigail ! How inexpressibly trying to her mind must have 
been the degraded brutish habits of such a husband ! How 
strong must have been her innate dignity, her self-possession and 
enduring temper, to have so acquired and preserved the respect 
and faithfulness of her household, whom the example of their 
master might have rendered rude and sottish as himself, and 
who, were woman lowered in Israel, could have had no restraint 
whatever. 

Wisely, though no doubt with a sorrowful heart, she left 
Nabal undisturbed in his inebriety till the morning’s light, 
although the news of the danger which he had so narrowly 
escaped would effectually have roused him from his idle mirth. 
When told, its effect seems extraordinary, “ his heart died with- 
in him, and he became as stone ;” only explained by the suppo- 
sition of his utter want of manliness and trust, which prevented 
all belief in David’s assurances, and occasioned such vivid horror 
of his vengeance as literally to cause the death he dreaded ; for 
“ ten days after, the Lord emote Nabal that he died.” Au 
awful chastisement for his churlish insult to the young warrior 
known throughout all Israel as the Anointed of the Eternal. He 


SO THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

had grudged the smallest particle of his immense stores to ona 
who, with such winning courtesy, had asked it at his hand ; and 
the Eternal's justice, by one stroke, deprived him of them all, 
and compelled him, naked and bare, to appear before His awful 
throne in judgment for his crimes. And those crimes came not 
under the denomination of great delinquencies ; they were those 
petty sins of stingy selfishness and an aggravating disobliging 
temper, which (how often !) grow upon us unconsciously ; and 
we scarcely know their influence till some awful stroke of judg- 
ment awakens us to what we might have been, and to what we are. 
His wife’s narrative was this awakening stroke to Nabal. He 
had sunk too low, too enervatingly, in the fathomless abyss of 
selfish indulgence to rouse himself to a better course of life, so 
that deadly fear of vengeance took possession of him, and com- 
bined with a torturing recollection of an abused and wasted 
existence, rendered him as feelingless and senseless as the stone 
to which he is compared. 

How completely the appeal of Abigail had awakened David 
to the sin which his immoderate anger prompted him to com- 
mit, we read by his pious and thankful exclamation, when he 
heard of Nabal’s death, “Blessed be the Lord that hath 
pleaded the cause of my reproach from the hand of Nabal, and 
hath kept His servant from evil , for the Lord hath returned the 
wickedness of Nabal on his own head ;” words not only illus- 
trative of his rejoicing thankfulness of his own restraint from 
sin, but also of his firm belief that all the changes of the heart 
are of God not man, and that would we keep ourselves from 
evil we must pray to Him to do so; not imagine we can keep 
pure, only by efforts of our own. 

It was now David’s turn to plead, and to her who had so 
lately knelt to him as a supplicant. When the usual term of 
mourning for a husband was over, “ he sent and communed 
with Abigail to become his wife.” Her answer is strikingly 
illustrative of that beautiful humility of character which is so 
perfectly compatible with true dignity and modest self-esteem, 
“ Behold, let thine handmaid be a servant, to wash the feet of 
the servants of my lord.” When she was in the character of a 
‘petitioner, we find no such expressions; for in entreaty they 
would have been servile and degrading ; but as the petitioned , 
they did but express the deep sense she entertained of her own 
individual unworthiness, as little suiting her to be the wife of 


PERIOD IV. ABIGAIL. 31 

one whom the Lord God of Israel had so singled out above his 
fellows. In worldly state and earthly possessions, David could 
not compare with her former husband. Destined to the king- 
dom he was indeed ; but as we have previously stated, there was 
no human semblance that such he would be, or any apparent 
end to the troubles, the privations, the wanderings to which he 
was still so mercilessly exposed. Yet he was the beloved, the 
chosen of the Lord ; and in comparison with the holiness — the 
virtue which must have originally gained him these appellations 
in the hearts of his countrymen — Abigail might well have 
deemed herself unworthy. She became his wife, however , and 
though in doing so, she exchanged the wealth, the security, the 
luxuries of such an establishment as had been Nabal’s, for an 
anxious and wandering life, continually exposed to danger from 
the enmity of Saul and his followers, and to captivity from the 
neighboring nations ; yet still the love and sympathy of such a 
mind as David’s, the rest from the wearying annoyances of a dis- 
eased temper, the indulgence of pious emotions and obedience 
to all the observances of religion without the sneering scorn of a 
churlish and uncongenial disposition, must indeed have marked 
the exchange as a blessed one, and rendered her after life as 
happy as it had previously been sad. 

We have one more mention of Abigail, and in the very situa- 
tion of suffering and peril to which, as we have said, she 
was, as the wife of David, continually exposed. About two 
years after his marriage, David took refuge in the kingdom of 
Gath, and besought and obtained from Achish, their king, the 
town of Ziklag, which, though situated in the territory of 
Simeon, had till then belonged to the Philistines. In that city, 
David and his companions, with their wives and children, com- 
posed a faithful little Hebrew colony, and the town formed a 
quiet residence for the females and children while their hus- 
bands were engaged in war. On the many valiant acts of 
David we must not linger. Two years after he had received 
the gift of Ziklag, the Philistines gathered together all their 
armies in Aphek, and the Israelites pitched by a fountain in 
Jezreel. David and his men were with the rere-ward of the 
army of Achish ; but, distrusted by the princes and lords of the 
Philistines, because of their being Israelites, they were dis- 
banded from the army ; and in consequence returned to Ziklag. 
Only three days had elaosed since they had left it ; but what a 


32 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


change awaited their return ! The city was a heap of smoking 
ruins, and their wives and their sons and their daughters, all 
had been carried off; the Amalekites had made an invasion in 
the south, and without tarrying to slay, had marked their path 
with fire, and carried off every woman and child. Few lengthy 
descriptions of grief have the force and beauty of the Scriptural 
relation, “Then David and the people that were with him 
lifted up their voices and wept, until they had no more power 
to weepy And David himself had not only to mourn the loss 
of his two wives, but was “ greatly distressed, for the people 
spake of stoning him, because the soul of all the people was 
grieved, every man for his sons and for his daughters.” Stoning 
him, the Lord’s anointed ! How fearfully must grief have dis- 
ordered the minds and hearts of his followers ; and how pa.m- 
ful the position of David. To feel distress was no weakness in 
Israel. Human nature is never described in the Bible as other 
than deeply susceptible of all human and gentle emotions. 
Religion in Israel was never intended to render the heart 
insensible to the sweet charities of life and all their subsequent 
afflictions. It was no sin to weep — no weakness to feel dis- 
tressed — but as “David encouraged himself in the Lord his 
God,” so too must we, when the deep waters of affliction flow 
over us ; and like him we shall receive the guidance and 
encouragement we need. But even in this emergency, when 
every human feeling must have been striving within him, urging 
instant action, we find him in meekness and humility inquiring 
of the Lord. And to him God vouchsafed reply, and bade him 
pursue, “for thou shalt surely overtake them and without fait 
recover all.” 

To enter into the detail of this chivalrous expedition we have 
not space, as it relates more to David than to his wife, whose 
history we are recording. Our readers will find the whole far 
more emphatically told than could be by an uninspired pen, in 
the xxxth chapter of the First Book of Samuel. Suffice it here 
to state, “ that David recovered all that the Amalekites had 
carried away ; and he rescued his two wives, and there was 
nothing lacking to him, neither small nor great, neither sons 
nor daughters, nor anything that they had taken to them; 
David recovered all.” 

The whole of this stirring tale reminds us of those narratives 
of the middle ages, on which the youthful lovers of chivalry 


PERIOD IV. ABIGAIL 


33 


delight to linger; why should they not then feel equal pleasure 
in the inspired story of their immediate ancestors ? We have 
quite enough of Abigail’s character and sentiments revealed, to 
give us all sufficient for a just conception of what not only her 
feelings but her conduct must have been, when she saw the 
city of her husband burnt and sacked, and herself and all her 
female companions, with their helpless children, carried off by 
their lawless foes — exposed to every horror which the mind 
could frame or the heart could dread. The wild attack ; the 
hurried flight ; the agony of those days of capture which could 
have no hopeful future, for David and his men were with 
Achish, and the time of their return to Ziklag so uncertain, that 
traces of the Amalekite spoilers might be lost ere their capture 
was ever known ; and then the wild rekindling of hope at the 
sudden descent of David and his men ; the awful strife lasting 
from even unto even ; the glorious conquest ; and the reunion 
of husbands and wives, children and fathers ; are so completely 
all the elements of romance, that we need little of imagination 
to give it life and breath, or turn to the records of fiction for 
events to stir the very heart’s blood with the recital of chivalric 
deeds. 

But not to record it merely in its romantic bearings, have we 
brought this portion of Scripture forward. It is to remark how 
truly and beautifully both the grief and the exertions of David 
and his men demonstrate the extent of love, conjugal and 
parental, which reigned in the Hebrew households. It is a 
beautiful illustration of the spirit of those Mosaic laws, which, 
penetrating the very homes of the first-born of the Lord, guided 
and sanctified the conduct of husbands and wives, children and 
parents. Love was the watchword of Israel, alike in their 
relations to their Father in heaven, and to each other. That 
the law was severe in its justice, is no contradiction to this asser- 
tion. Its perfection of justice was far purer, deeper, more 
influencing Love, than the modern codes which are pronounced 
ao much more merciful. 

The social and domestic position of the wife of Nabal must 
have been as perfectly free, independent, and influencing, as that 
of any woman of the present day, be the laws which guide her 
what they may. We perceive the counsel and wisdom of their 
mistress, sought and followed by the servants of Nabal without 
the smallest regard to their master. Compare this liberty of 


34 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


will and action, this exercise of judgment displayed in the 
history of Abigail, with the position and the characters of the 
Eastern females of the present day, under the laws of Mahomet, 
and then let truth pronounce which are the degraded ? Again, 
we are expressly told, that Abigail was not merely a beautiful 
woman, but of good understanding , which her whole story 
proves; and yet more, every word of her address to David 
evinces an almost remarkable knowledge of the ways and the 
words of the Lord. She is even called by the Ancient Fathers 
a prophetess. “ There were seven women of Israel,” they say, 
“ who were prophetesses — Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, 
Abigail, Huldah, and Esther.” We know not on what authority 
our venerable sages have honored by the term prophetess, those 
whom the Bible does not so distinguish; but it is a forcible 
proof of the deep learning and profound knowledge of the Word 
of God which must have been possessed by Abigail, and which 
she could not have acquired without study. The study of reli 
gion, then, was evidently not prohibited to the women of Israel ; 
and therefore we know not by what authority such blessed study 
can be denied to us now. 

Nor is it only religious knowledge which Abigail’s character 
developes. It is a perfect acquaintance with human nature , else 
she had not so soon turned aside the wrath of David. J udg- 
ment, intellect, and talent all breathe in her eloquent appeal, 
and evince an elevation of intelligence impossible to be obtained 
were the social position of woman confined to household work. 
The more we study the story of Abigail, the more deeply we 
must feel how valuable it is to us as women of Israel ; how 
impressively it marks out our privileges in every relation of life, 
and how unanswerably it proves that Jewish women need 
no other creed to give them either spiritual or temporal 
advantages. 

As women, the character of Abigail equally concerns us. We 
have frequently insisted that the narratives , as well as the pre- 
cepts, of the Bible are written for our guidance ; and therefore 
are we so anxious to bring forward all that can aid our young 
bisters in making their Bibles their daily guide. Many would 
do so, but they know not how, from the sad scarcity of religious 
books amongst us, in modern tongues. The more we daily 
«tudy the Bible, the more easy in truth shall we find it ; but 
then we must not confine our readings to the five books of 


PERIOD IV. ABIGAIL. 


35 


Moses. One chapter every morning, one every night, and three 
on the Sabbath, complete the whole Bible — Pentateuch, Hagio- 
graphy, and Prophets — all, with the sole exception of the 
Psalms, in the three hundred and sixty-five days forming the 
Nazarene year; and this formed into a habit, not done one yeai 
and laid aside, but persevered in for a life, would, in process of 
time, and without either labor or weariness, give the comfort 
and the knowledge that we seek. Nor need we fear that we 
shall grow weary of the task; each year it would become 
lighter and more blessed, each year we should discover some- 
thing we knew not before, and in the valley of the shadow of 
death feel, to our heart’s core, that the word of our God is in 
truth “ the rod and the staff, they comfort me,” of which the 
Monarch-Psalmist spake. 

We have already noticed the little power which Nabal’s 
churlish temper, and all the discomforts thence ensuing, had 
over the pious and energetic character of Abigail. From her 
wise forbearance towards him, both in acting without his know- 
ledge in seeking David, and in not mentioning the effect of that 
interview till he was in a state to hear it, we can quite infer, 
that she not only bore with a churlish temper, but well knew 
how to manage it — a task not a little difficult, and which none 
but an unselfish and well controlled temper ever can attempt. 
Many women, instead of acting on such an emergency, would 
have lost all the proper time of action in vain lamentations, and 
in bi/ter reproaches of the churlish folly which had caused it ; 
or, if they acted as Abigail did, many would have displayed 
triumph , w’ould have vaunted of their own skill in turning wrath 
aside, and taunted Nabal with what might have befallen him. 
But Abigail, with true womanly dignity, did neither. That she 
had been permitted to save her household from an imminent 
danger was enough for her — and if the kind providence of the 
Eternal had not ordained it otherwise, she would have returned 
to all her usual quiet duties and silent endurance, never dream- 
ing that her conduct had evinced anything worthy of reward. 

Let us then, as woman, not only admire, but imitate the 
piety, the forbearance, and the energy of our gentle ancestress, 
assured that such virtues are acceptable to our God. Many 
and many a one have a Nabal in their households in one or 
other relation of life. Temper, thought of so little, encouraged 
because it is no palpable vice, so blinding the eyes of its pos- 


30 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


sessor as to fling its black shadow on all his associates, till the$ 
are thought the churlish, not himself ; temper, the severer of 
so many gentle ties, the rude breaker of so many loving hearts, 
the baleful spirit of so many otherwise richly favored homes, — 
oh, what but a character, a piety, an energy like Abigail’s can 
enable us to sustain its trials, in a manner acceptable to the 
Lord, and not overwhelming to ourselves! As women, as 
women of Israel more especially, let us endeavor to cultivate 
these noble qualities, and feel that even for the sufferings of a 
churlish temper, we have sympathy, comfort, and guidance in 
the Bible. We may not all have either the beauty or the 
good understanding of Abigail ; but we may all have piety and 
energy and influence if we so will, the one springs from the 
other ; for the want of energy, the absence of all influence, 
arises from a listless indifference which never can exist with 
true piety. The service of God demands constant watchfulness, 
constant activity, aye, and constant thought ; nor can we serve 
Him, apart from serving our fellow-creatures. To bear and 
forbear is peculiarly woman’s duty — in every station of life, and 
more especially towards a husband; and every religious and 
justly feeling woman will rouse her every energy to conceal, or 
at least prevent, the evil consequences of temper and ill judg- 
ment spreading over her household, and lowering the character 
of a husband in the minds of his inferiors. Abigail’s constant 
superiority of judgment and action we learn by her servants 
going to her without hesitation. They must have frequently 
confided in her judgment before, else they could not have 
demonstrated such implicit trust in a moment of danger. 

Her influence we as clearly perceive in the success of her 
appeal to David ; a quick judgment and few well chosen words 
saved herself and household from destruction, and David from 
the committal of a great sin. And if by the cultivation of mind 
and manner woman can achieve such things, who shall deny 
her the privilege of being an instrument of good, or seek to 
confine her to a false and degraded position, and so compel 
either vacuity and idleness, or frivolity and folly ? We may 
not be called upon to exert our influence in a matter of life o* 
death, but few are the women who pass through this life with- 
out some opportunity to use their natural influence for good, 
either in the encouragement of worth, or the wise and gentle 
guidance from the paths of sin. If there are some who wil’ 


PERIOD IV. WOMAN OF TEKOAH. 37 

deny this, who will assert that in their isolated position they 
have influence on none, and have no power to do good, we 
would say, it is because they seek it not , not because they have it 
not ; and beseech them to rouse their dormant energy to find 
and use it, and by the superiority of their mental resources, 
their spiritual piety, their noble energy, and pure meek womanly 
influence, alike in their domestic and social position, make mani* 
fest to the nations how deeply they feel and glory in the 
privileges accorded to, and in the duties demanded from them, 
as the female children of the Lord. 


CHAPTER nr. 

WISE WOMAN OF TEKOAII. W OMAN OF ABEL, 

RIZPAH. JUDGMENT OF SOLOMON. 

WIDOW OF ONE OF THE SONS OF THE 
PROPHETS. 

The period of our history which we are now regarding, will 
not supply us with such regular biographies as the preceding 
ones. Between Abigail and the Shunammite, in the time of 
Elisha, there is no female character which we can look upon as 
a whole, and derive thence individual benefit ; but in the years 
of the monarchy stretching between the two above-mentioned, 
there are some notices of women peculiarly valuable to us in a 
national sense, as portraying our position, both social and 
intellectual. 

The first of these is the wise woman of Tekoah, suborned by 
Joab to incline the king’s heart towards Absalom. In what 
sense the epithet “ a wise woman” was regarded, we cannot exactly 
determine ; but from Joab sending at once to Tekoah, we are 
led to suppose her a person noted for her wisdom, and selected 
for that reason. Her story is, of course, a feigned one, and 
therefore does not command our commiseration; but it is 
raluable, as it so undeniably manifests how easy it was for the 


lid THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

women of Israel to obtain the ear of the monarch, and receive 
justice and protection at his hand, even against the opinions of 
the people. She tells David that she is a widow who had two 
sons, one of whom, in striving with the other, had smitten and 
slain him. That the whole family had risen against the widow 
commanding her to deliver up the survivor, that they might 
revenge his brother’s death by also slaying him ; and so, in the 
beautiful language of Scripture, “ quench my coal which is left, 
and not leave my husband neither name nor remainder upon the 
earth.” David, in answer, desires her to return to her home in 
peace ; that he would give chaige concerning her. Still she 
lingers, and he reiterates, “ Whosoever saith aught unto thee, 
bring him unto me, and he shall not touch thee any more. 
Then said she, I pray thee, let the king remember the Lord thy 
God, that thou wouldst not suffer the revengers of blood to 
destroy any more, lest they destroy my son. And he said, As 
the Lord liveth, there shall not one hair of thy son fall to the 
ground.” 

By this we are led to believe, that the supposed crime of the 
one brother against the other came under the accidental mur- 
ders, where the slayer was permitted to seek the cities of 
refuge. It is, as we know, a fictitious tale of grief ; still it is 
important to mark how exactly it tallies with obedience to the 
laws. The woman asserts herself to be a widow, and conse- 
quently the peculiar care of her brethren. Her position is 
sanctified, and therefore is it that David not only hears her, and 
promises that he will take her in charge, but pledges himself to 
yet greater leniency than the law allows. In his own case, one 
exactly similar, David had done such violence to his own 
parental feelings, that three years had elapsed since he had 
looked on his darling Absalom, towards whom we are expressly 
told his soul longed to go forth. The laws of his country might 
not be transgressed for him, though a sovereign ; and yet for a 
mourning widow his kind heart yielded. This does not evince 
disregard to woman’s feelings, or that they were less objects of 
care in the state than man, but rather th6 complete contrary ; 
the king's son was to remain in exile and ignominy, the widow's 
son was to be protected and pardoned. 

Not content with the fasor granted the supposed widow, she 
proceeds to entreat the king. “ Let thine handmaid speak, I 
oray thee, one word unto my lord the king. And the king said, 


PERIOD IV. WOMAN OF TEKOAII. 


39 


Say on.” And then boldly and unhesitatingly the suppliant 
turns reprover; and, making her own case the king’s, pro- 
nounces it a faulty judgment, else why does he not fetch home 
his banished? We need not transcribe the whole of her well 
judged appeal (see 2 Sam. xiv.). The king’s penetration at 
once discovered the red mover of this scene, and addressing the 
woman as his equal, instead of demanding the truth from her as 
some might imagine due to his royal prerogative, he asks, 
w Hide not from me, I pray thee, the thing that I shall ask thee. 
And the woman said, Let my lord the king now speak. And 
the king said, Is not the hand of Joab with thee in all this ?” 
The whole was consequently revealed ; but no anger at the 
deception followed. The king’s word had passed, and though it 
was to a supposed case, he would not withdraw it. The 
young man Absalom was recalled from his grandfather’s court, 
and brought by Joab to Jerusalem ; but still true to his pater- 
nal severity, David would not listen to his feelings ; and for two 
years, though dwelling in the same town, the father and son 
never saw each other’s face ; whereas, had the widow’s story 
been true, he would have permitted her the rich blessing of her 
son’s continued presence and full pardon. 

The incident is not an important one in itself ; but by Joab’s 
seeking a woman to bring the king to his wishes ; by the little 
difficulty she had to obtain a hearing; by the kindness and 
feeling which dictated the monarch’s manner and words towards 
her, we cannot entertain a doubt of the real position of w r omen 
in Judea ; — that she was thought of, felt for, and protected, infi- 
nitely more in the state of Israel, than in any contemporary or 
even in any more modern nation ; that even warriors and courtiers 
disdained not to ask and use her aid ; and that the king himself 
listened, not only when she was a supplicant on her own affairs, 
but when the strain was changed, and she ventured to address 
him on his own. 

Nor is she the only “ wise woman” whose instrumentality is 
mentioned in Holy Writ. Soon after the death of Absalom 
other confusions arose ; and a quarrel took place between the 
men of Israel and the tribe of Judah, as to who should have the 
greater influence over the aged king, “and the words of the 
men of Judah were fiercer than the words of the men of Israel 
in consequence of which, a man of Belial (the scriptural terra 
*br a seditious and rebellious spirit) named Sheba, a Benjam'te, 


»0 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


clew a trumpet, and proclaimed, “ We have no part in David 
neither have we inheritance in the son of Jesse ; every man tc 
his tents, O Israel” — the usual war cry of the Jews. “ So every 
man of Israel went up from David, and followed Sheba, the son 
of Bichri : but the men of Judah clave unto their king.” A 
war of course ensued, seeming likely to be yet more injurious to 
Judea than even Absalom’s rebellion. And Joab with a large 
army “ went from Jerusalem to pursue Sheba.” Ilis appear- 
ance and proclamation, “ He that is for David let him go after 
Joab,” recalled the wavering Israelites, and Sheba was com- 
pelled to take refuge in the city of Abel of Beth-maachab. 
There Joab besieged him, casting up a bank against the city, 
and rearing battering engines against the wall, so that destruc- 
tion and slaughter were inevitable ; for no possibility or 
inclination for resistance appeared from within. Not one man 
had the necessary courage and wisdom to come forward, either 
to pacify Joab or to meet him in battle. A hesitation no doubt 
occasioned by the fear of Sheba, the natural reluctance to the 
delivering up of one who had taken refuge in their city, and the 
yet greater reluctance to rise against David. Between these 
conflicting emotions the downfall of the city was inevitable ; but 
there was one within its walls, not only a wise, but a patriotic 
woman, who, boldly taking on herself all risk of personal 
danger, alike from the battering rams of Joab without and the 
rage of Sheba’s adherents within, suddenly appeared upon the 
walls and called aloud, “ Hear, hear ; say, I pray thee, unto 
Joab, Come near hither, that I may speak with thee.” 

The noise of attack on the part of the besiegers involuntarily 
ceased, and soldiers and general must have gazed with some 
astonishment on the vision appearing thus boldly before them. 
And Joab approaching, she bade him “ hear the words of thine 
handmaid. And he said, I do hear. Then she spake, saying, 
They were wont to speak in old time, saying, They shall surely 
ask counsel at Abel, and so they ended the matter rather 
obscure words, yet, as appears to us from the succeeding verse, 
meaning that, in former years, the councils held by the inhabit- 
ants of Abel ended all difficult matters ; but that Joab coming 
upon them in determined hostility had prevented any amicable 
treaty, and had in consequence checked the interference of all 
such who, like herself, were “ peaceable and faithful in Israel.” 

The address also appears to allude to, and in fact <o illustrate, 


PERIOD IV. W OMAN OF ABEL. 


4k 


tl *e law contained in Deut. xx. 10 — 12. “ When thou comesi 

nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it. 
And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto 
thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein 
shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee. Andii 
it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, 
then thou shalt besiege it.” Joab’s impetuous zeal seems to 
have neglected this merciful ordinance, and therefore no council 
as in ancient times could be held in Abel, and no decision made, 
either for peace or war. And this was the more blamable or 
the part of Joab, because the city belonged to David; the inha- 
bitants were his own subjects. The speaker feels this in he* 
concluding words, “Thou seekest to destroy a city and mother 
in Israel : why wilt thou swallow up the inheritance of the 
Lord.” 

All she says is so essentially feminine, so moderate and gentle, 
that it at once satisfies us that her boldness and wisdom in no 
way mark her a masculine character. She was still a mother 
in Israel ; her endowments were evidently common to her sex and 
country, proving that they knew well how to unite the wisdom of 
the patriot with all the graces of the woman. Her very first words 
to Joab, “ Hear the words of thine handmaid,” mark her perfect 
consciousness of her own position, and pay that respect due alike 
to the rank and generalship of the person she addressed. An 
assumption of wisdom and consequently of authority, would 
have lost her the ear of Joab at once. A man may be influenced 
by woman, but not dictated to, however superior may be her 
wisdom. We cannot discover the wisdom of this mother in 
Israel in her actual words , so much as in her actions. The 
address was indeed well chosen, for it appealed directly to the 
best and holiest feelings of Joab, and could only have proceeded 
from a mind long accustomed to well regulated thought ; but her 
sole plea was, that she was a “ mother in Israel,” a character and 
station to which the rudest and hardest natures never refused 
reverence. 

“ Far be it, far be it from me,” was Joab’s earnest answer, “ to 
swallow up or destroy — the matter is not so, but a man of mount 
Ephraim, Sheba the son of Bichri by name, hath lifted up his 
hand against the king, even against David. Deliver him only, 
find I will depart from the city. And the woman said, Behold, 
his head shall be thrown to thee over the wall. Then the 


12 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


woman went unto all the people in her wisdom ; and they cul 
off the head of Sheba the son of Bichri, and cast it out to Joab ; 
and he blew a trumpet, and they retired from the city every man 
to his tent. And Joab returned to Jerusalem and to the king.* 
(2 Sam. xx.) 

There will be no doubt some fair affectors of refinement, hor- 
ror-stricken at the idea of a woman being influential in tiiQ 
execution of a criminal, and condemn the age in which such 
deeds were done, as something too barbarous to be regarded 
without a shudder. Now, there are few of our countrywomen, 
we think, more painfully affected by scenes and thoughts of 
blood than ourself ; but it is the necessity for such fearful punish- 
ments we feel and mourn, more than the punishment itself. The 
Eternal ordained capital punishments for capital crimes ; and if 
His infinite wisdom and His immeasurable mercy saw that it was 
good so to do, surely we poor weak finite creatures of a day, can 
have neither right nor wisdom to deem such acts of justice cruel, 
or loathe them as remnants of barbarity. Joab’s demand was 
unanswerably just. The man whose seditious and rebellious 
spirit sought to light the flame of discord all over Judea, and 
dared to arm his countrymen against the Lord’s Anointed, was 
deserving of death ; and his own execution saved the lives of 
hundreds. 

Was it not then an act of far greater mercy to demand the 
head of Sheba, than, by the weak shrinking from a duty so 
painfully repugnant to woman’s nature, expose men, women, and 
children, in countless numbers, to the destroying sword ? Yet, 
from the latter few would shrink as they do from the former, 
only because there is something so dreadful in the idea of a 
woman seeking the life of a fellow-creature. She sought, in fact, 
to snve life, not to take it ; and her efforts were successful. 
Enviable must have been that “ wise woman’s” feelings as the 
trumpet sounded, and the fierce warriors under the command of 
Joab struck their tents, withdrew their battering-rams, and in 
goodly array marched away from the pre-doomed city ; leaving 
freedom and rejoicing gladness behind them, in a people saved 
alike from the destroying sword, and from the sin of strife and 
rebellion against the Lord’s Anointed ! 

Now, it is not at all likely that these wise counsels were the 
.repulse of the moment. The women of Israel must have had a 
roice even in the senate of their several cities. Their position 


PERIOD IV. R I Z P A H . AZ 

must have been alike elevated and intellectual. In a state lik<j 
Israel, composed as it was of so many unruly members and con- 
stantly seditious spirits, wisdom could no more have obtained 
ascendency without cultivation then, than it can now. Had 
there been any law confining woman to any particular sphere, 
prohibiting her interference in any religious or secular matters, 
wisdom and judgment would not only have been publicly use- 
less in a woman, but privately uncultivated, and we should find 
no such instances as the two we have recorded. A little atten- 
tive thought on the condition of the beleaguered city, the multi- 
tude of diverse opinions with which at such a time it must have 
been agitated, moved as it was by the presence and pleadings 
of the arch-rebel himself, the fierce troops without, the noise of 
the siege, and all its concomitant terrors ; and remember, that 
out of these multitudes it was a woman who came forward, a 
mother in Israel (how sacred is the term !) who in her wisdom 
obtained not only the hearing of Joab, but, a more difficult 
matter, of the warring people, and bent them like a reed, only 
from the superiority of Mind, — must we not feel to our heart’s core 
the real position of the women of Israel in the Past ? That she, 
even as man, enjoyed not alone the spiritual, but the intellec- 
tual and refining privileges of being one of the chosen of God ; 
and must we not long for that Future, when we shall again be 
blessed and influential in our own most holy land, doing the will 
of God, and being in very truth spiritually and temporally helps 
meet for His sons ? Oh, shall not the thought of the past, and 
of the future, influence Israel’s Present, and waken her daugh- 
ters to their immortal heritage, in being of the first-born 
children of the Lord ; who holdeth them so inexpressibly dear, 
that the individual or nation who injureth them injureth the 
apple of His eye ? Is not the thought that we are of a nation 
so beloved, sufficient incentive for the cultivation of spirituality, 
virtue, intellect, wisdom, affection, devotedness to God and man, 
all that could make the days of this life even “ as the days of 
heaven on the earth ?” 

The devotion of Kizpah is another exquisitely beautiful trait 
of female character. Its mention does not contain a lesson, but 
a picture. It does not tell us what woman should be, but what 
she is, and is valuable as proving that the women of the Bible 
are but portraits of woman’s nature now. The stern mandate 
of the Lord against the bloody house of Saul had not all beep 


t4 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

fulfilled ; and justice, that inscrutable justice which man dare not 
hope to explain, demanded the execution of the last remaining 
scions of the family of Saul. The narrative contained in the first 
nine verses of 2 Sam. xxi., is one on which .t is better not to 
huger, lest it arouse doubts and questions verging on impiety, 
[t is enough that it was the ordinance of the Eternal, and that 
He ever tempereth justice with mercy ; and though to finite 
minds, in this instance, mercy may seem hidden in blood, it it 
enough for us to know, that “ God’s ways are not our ways, nor 
His thoughts our thoughts,” and calmly resting on this blessed 
truth, dismiss the subject as one to be explained hereafter, when 
the immortal likeness of God in which made He man, purified 
from the corrupting clay, will be permitted to trace the secret of 
His ways ; and all that in His word seemed dark and terrible, 
bear witness to the perfect justice and the perfect mercy of Him, 
with whom “ is the fountain of life, and in whose light we shall 
see light.” 

Day and night, from the beginning of the barley harvest, till 
the rain came down from heaven, a period of many weeks, did 
Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, keep solitary watch beside the 
mouldering bodies of the last remnants of the house of Saul 
“ She took sackcloth and spread it for her upon the rock, and 
suffered neither the birds of the air to rest upon them by day, 
nor the beasts of the field by night.” What a volume of 
woman’s heart is told in that brief verse ! That devotedness to 
the beloved dead whjch would guard the poor remnants of 
mortality from all insult of bird or beast — that lingering beside 
all which was spared her, alas, for that mournful “ all !” 
Scorched by the sun of day, and chilled by the dews of night, 
yet movel she not from the stony rock, nor cared she for aught 
besides. Mourning, yet not repining ; guarding the hallowed 
dead, yet breathing not her anguish, save through the tears that 
fell on the impenetrable rock, the sighs that mingled with the 
breeze. Who might feel for her, sole remnant of that bloody 
house? Who might lament those deaths which retribution 
called? None. And the mourner asked naught of man. 
Her world was by the dead, and there the mocking sun and the 
pitying moon gazed down upon her in her sad and solitary watch. 
And oh, is not this woman ? — Is not this the love, the devoted- 
ness, which are the natural dwellers of woman’s heart, w r hen 
naught but nature speaks? And not entirely unsympathized 


period iv. — S olomon’s judgment. 45 

was her affliction. It reached the ear, and penetrated the heart, 
of the feeling and affectionate king, and the bones of Saul and 
Jonathan, and of them that were hanged, were gathered by 
David’s express command, and buried with due honors in the 
sepulchre of Kish the father of Saul, which was in the country 
of his tribe ; and thus that fearful ignominy, so revolting to an 
Israelite, the denying burial to the dead, was removed from the 
house of Saul by the devotion of a woman. Who, then, will 
assert that the purest and best feelings of our nature find no 
place in the Word of God ? Who can seek to make religion 
trample on the most sacred feelings of humanity, by asserting 
that, if we truly love the Lord, we can never grieve nor be 
afflicted ? How painfully mistaken are those who would thus 
instruct, and how sadly deceived those who would banish all 
feeling from woman’s nature! Who would guide her by rule 
and measure ? Who would check every enthusiastic impulse, 
every kind sentiment, every sympathizing emotion, every 
imaginative glow, all because it is so unfitted for this unromantic 
world ; and therefore destines its possessor to more pain than 
pleasure ? Oh, if we believe the Word of the Lord divine, let 
us come there, and we shall find guides for feeling as well as for 
action. There we find the emotions which God in His mercy 
gave, encouraged, not subdued ; feeling, devotedness, affection, 
enthusiasm, all that can lift us up from the mere petty concerns 
and thoughts of a day, are there brought forward ; and why then 
should the sweet emotions of the Israelite in the past, be 
deemed folly and romance, and so unworthy of the Israelite in 
the 'present ? Oh ! as women, women of Israel, let us cultivate 
every emotion which can refine and elevate and prepare us for 
that Future which has been so long our promised heritage! 
We are but strangers and sojourners in the land of our 
captivity ; but our destiny is laid up with our God for that day 
when, in the face of the whole world, we shall be acknowledged 
as His own. 

The next striking evidence of woman’s social position in our 
prcsenf Period, is found in the far-famed, often-quoted judg- 
ment of ' Solomon. The wisdom of the monarch’s sentence is 
the point generally insisted upon, to the exclusion of all the 
other topics of interest which this remarkable incident presents. 

The term harlot , more than once applied to women in the 
Bible, had a very different meaning to that in which it is alonf 


LQ THE WOMEN OP ISRAEL. 

used now. It is generally supposed to signify, indiscriminately 
an innkeeper or hostess, as in the case of Rahab, or women in 
the servile classes, independent of servitude in households, but 
occupying some trades in Jerusalem peculiar to themselves. 
They had, in consequence, neither rank, wealth, nor any of the 
usual accessories to the royal favor. Yet we find that the very 
first persons who obtained access to Solomon, after the offerings 
with which he sanctified his entrance into Jerusalem, were two 
women of this class. It was not that there were no inferior 
courts of justice in the Mosaic Law, no order or division of ranks 
in the Jewish State. There were all these. Yet, if the women 
of Israel demanded the judgment of their monarch himself, the 
very lowest classes had access to him ; and their cases wero 
heard and judged. Certainly a very different mode of proceed- 
ing to the customs of other nations, either then or now. 

Surrounded by his officers and court, in the magnificent array 
which marked all the proceedings of King Solomon, the 
monarch listened with patient and sympathizing attention tc 
the tale of affliction boldly spoken before him. It was a sad 
and a strange one, and seemingly so difficult for a just decision 
on the part of the youthful judge, that interest was in no slight 
degree excited. Two women dwelt in the same house, to each 
of whom a child was born ; the one within three days of the 
other. They were alone within the house, and the child of the 
one woman died, and she arose at midnight and changed the 
dead for the living ; and when her companion awoke in the 
morning, to nurse her child, behold it was dead ; but when she 
had looked on it attentively, it was not her child which she did 
bear. And when the complainant narrated this tale, her 
opponent denied that it was so, saying, “ Nay, but the living is 
my son, and the dead is thy son ! And this said, No, but the 
dead is thy son, and the living is my son ; and thus they spake 
before the king.” In a modern court of justice we think a 
similar case would be found somewhat difficult to solve. Solo- 
mon made no pause ; repeating the charge and its denial, so 
as to make it clear to all who heard, he continued, “ Bring me 
\ sword,” and when obeyed, pronounced that memorable 
sentence which first revealed his godlike wisdom to his subjects : 
— “ Divide the living child in two, give half to the one, and 
half to the other. Then spake the woman whose the living 
ehild was, unto the king, for her bowels yearned unto her eon : 


period iv. — Solomon’s judgment. 41 

Oh ! my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it ; 
but the other said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide 
it. And the king answered and said, Give her [the first 
speaker] the living child, and in no wise slay it, she is the 
mother thereof !” And if all Israel, when they heard of this 
judgment, feared the king, for they saw that the wisdom of 
God was in him, how deeply, how gratefully, must the real 
mother have rejoiced in the courage which brought her before 
the monarch, and, through his sentence, received back her son ! 

Solomon’s wisdom, in this instance, proceeded simply from a 
profound knowledge of human nature. He tested the truth or 
falsehood of the relation by an appeal to the heart, and decided 
acccrding to its unguarded witness, demanding nothing more 
for his own satisfaction or that of his hearers. The incident is 
a trifling one ; but it is valuable in demonstrating the social 
position of the women of Israel at the period. We have already 
seen that to obtain the monarch’s ear was quite accessible to 
woman, in the narration of David and the widow of Tekoah ; 
but the present instance is, if possible, still more convincing, 
from the fact of the women being of the lowest classes, and 
having no friendly influence to bring them forward ; nothing in 
fact to plead in their favor, but their privileges as women of 
Israel, which of course gave them admission to their earthly 
sovereign, who was but the vice-regent of Him by whom all 
Israel, men, women, and children, were heard, judged, and 
answered : and when the law of the land permitted, nay, com- 
manded, impartial judgment on all who claimed it, women as 
well as men, it surely cannot be accused of either degrading or 
enslaving ; many an afflicted and oppressed one of the Gentile 
lands might be found to wish it were in action still. 

And how beautifully does this simple narrative display the 
power of nature ! It was far easier to resign her babe than 
see him die, even at the risk of her previous recital being disbe- 
lieved. She could feel nothing but the fatal command of the 
king to slay the child ; little could she think those agonized 
words of entreaty were expressly called for by the king, for the 
discovery of the truth; and that the burst of natural feeling 
would be the means of giving her back her child. How forcibly 
does this little anecdote confirm our reiterated assertion, that the 
Word of our God guides and portrays feeling as well as action, 
and that all oui purest, best, and noblest affections will always 
14 


13 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

find their reflection there. Aud this is one of the widest 
distinctions between the Bible and Profane History. The 
latter narrates events , actions, the palpable and striking parts 
of man, if we may so express it, but touches not that immaterial 
and subtle essence of thought and feeling, whence alone all that 
is palpable and striking comes. The Bible in a few brief words 
will give the key to actions, will simply portray a feeling, an 
impulse which flashes on the heart, awakening, as by electricity, 
the links of nature, which unite the present with the past in the 
history of humanity ; and we know such record is divine, else 
the darkly hidden, rarely penetrated, mysteries of the human 
heart could not have been so forcibly revealed. 

Nor are they the only illustrations of feeling. How touch- 
ingly illustrative of that affection is Elisha’s first address to 
Elijah ! When the latter threw his mantle upon aim, as sym- 
bolical of his elevation to the prophetical calling, a rush of 
strange yet ecstatic feeling must have taken possession of him : 
perhaps the aspirings of many years, the heart’s hopes and 
longings for such spiritual election, unknown to any but his own 
heart, were gratified. It must have been some extraordinary 
and incomprehensible impulse, actuating the resignation of all 
early employments and associations, simply to follow Elijah — 
feelings probably overwhelming in their suddenness ; yet we find 
him in the midst of them thinking of his parents. “ Let me, I 
prav thee, kiss my father and my mother, and then I will 
follow thee.” 

It is in truth only a feeling, not any momentous incident 01 
striking illustration, which these simple words betray : but it is. 
often from little things like these, that we may form an estimate 
of the social condition and feelings of a people. The Jewish 
law, as we have seen, peculiarly and affectingly touches on the 
conduct and even emotions of children for their parents, and 
parents for their children. Elisha, we may feel sure, both from 
his being the anointed prophet of the Lord, and from the 
whole course of his after-life, had been brought up strictly as an 
Israelite. He had, as is often the case, received an education 
which, in the very midst of idolatry and misery, preserved him 
undefiled and fitted to supply Elijah’s place. His exclamation 
strongly proves how completely the affections were blended with 
spiritual gifts ; while from his lingering yearning towards his 
parents, we feel what they must have been tc him — his mother 


PERIOD IV. — PROPHET’S WIDOW. 49 

as well as his father. There is no such thing as filial reverence 
and love in nations where woman is degraded. In the Jewish 
nation, on the contrary, we find repeated instances of both reve- 
rence and love — such could not fail to have been the case when 
“ honor thy father and thy mother” was one of the first com- 
mands of God Himself. 

We trace, too, much of a mother’s nurture and influence in 
the peculiarly sweet and loving character of Elisha during hia 
prophetical career. His mission was almost all of love ; and the 
feeling and sympathy which he manifested to all who sought 
him, especially towards women, as we shall see in more than 
one instance, display a manly character formed by a zuoman's 
hand. 

One of the first miracles performed by Elisha was for a 
woman, evincing the tender kindness of his disposition, and 
proving that woman was not considered unworthy to receive 
relief, through him, from the hand of her gracious Gcd. She 
was a poor widow, whose only claim to the compassion of the 
prophet appeared to be, that he knew that her husband, “ thy 
servant, did fear the Lord.” But he died poor, and in debt, 
and, in exact illustration of the law, the creditor came to 
demand the service of his two sons, in lieu of the sum that was 
owing, — a hard trial for the poor woman, left in her bereave* 
ment with but two sons, from whom the justice of the law 
compelled her to part, unless she could raise money sufficient 
to discharge her debt ; and so without fear she approached the 
prophet, and stated her case. “ What shall I do for thee ?” was 
the commiserating reply ; “ tell me what hast thou in thy 
house.” And what a picture of uncomplaining poverty does 
her answer bring ! “ Thine handmaid hath nothing in the 

house but a pot of oil.” The prophet felt for and relieved her ; 
but how much of childlike and trusting faith must she have 
needed, in the obedience to his strange command, — “ Borrow 
thee vessels of all thy neighbors, even empty vessels, borrow 
not a few. And when thou art come in, thou shalt shut the 
door upon thee, and upon thy sons, and shalt pour out into all 
those \ easels, and thou shalt set aside that which is full.” 
Borrow vessels to fill with oil, when she had but one pot of oil 
in the house ! How could this be ? Was not the prophet 
playing with her distress? How could such a strange command 
avail hei ? Such questions would only have been natural ; but 


50 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


we do not find that they entered her mind, or prompted doubt 
and speculation. She might, perhaps, have heard of the widow 
of Zarephath, whose cruse of oil had miraculously lasted during 
the famine ; but more probably her instant obedience originated 
in that simple guileless trust which should characterize every 
feeling of our heart towards God. “ So she went from him, 
and shut the door upon her and upon her sons, who had 
brought the vessels to her, and poured out. And it came to 
pass when the vessels were full, that she said unto her son, 
Bring me yet another; and he said, There is not a vessel 
more ; and the oil stayed. Then she came and to. d the man of 
God, and he said, Go, sell the oil, and pay thy debt, and live, 
thou and thy children, on the rest.” It was not enough to give 
her 'present relief — the merciful kindness of the man of God 
provided also for the future, and gave her the blessed relief of 
retaining her children beside her. Now if woman were of no 
account in Israel, it would have been a greater kindness to take 
her sons from her, than leave them U her training. As a 
widow in Israel, she herself would have been provided for ; 
there was no need for this great mercy to have been shown her : 
nor in her retired, simple mode of living, could the performance 
of the miracle for her have increased Elisha’s prophetical repu- 
tation. She was a poor afflicted individual — of no more conse- 
quence amongst her countrymen, either in life or death, joy or 
sorrow, than were we to remove one grain of sand from the sea- 
shore. Yet she was as much an object of pitying mercy in the 
sight of her God and of His prophet, as the highest and most 
important in the land. And what was her sole plea for hearing 
and acceptance ? “ Thou knowest my husband, thy servant, did 

fear the Lord — meaning not only the departed, but herself 
and her whole household. There was no long list of high- 
sounding deeds, of sublime projects, and seemingly important 
services. The sons of the prophets, as they were called, 
appeared to have passed their quiet lives in holy meditation on 
the law and the works of God, and in serving Him by such 
deeds of unostentatious kindness and social benevolence as very 
often to die poor. They asked nothing but a bare sufficiency 
of board and lodging blessed with family love. They were 
never heard of out of their own retired sphere ; but they feared 
the Lord, and taught their wives and children to do so likewise. 
And this was the poor widow’s plea; ard it was accepted 


PERIOD IV. THE SHUNAMMITE. 


51 


And shall we then say the women of Israel have no access to 
God ? Do we need more than our own blessed faith and its 
vivid illustrations in the Eternal’s own word, to give us not only 
consolation but encouragement? Can we not all feel as that 
poor widow did — a guileless faith, which asked no question, 
but obeyed — which came at once to the man c£ God, and, 
though his words were strange, yet trusted and was relieved ? 

True, we have no man of God to whom to seek . we may 
not look to miracles for our relief ; but we may all come to God’s 
word, and, through it, to God Himself. There is no barrier 
between us and Him. Our holy faith gives us the blessed com 
solation of coming to Him direct, and of feeling that, if we do but 
seek to fear, and love, and serve Him, we shall be accepted and 
beloved. Lowliness of station, of intellect, of service, is of no 
account with Him. The poor widow is an evidence that the 
poorest and the humblest, the merest atom of His stupendous 
creation, is not unworthy of His regard, aye, even to the perform- 
ance of a miracle in her behalf ; and her sole plea was, she 
“feared the Lord.” Oh, let not the false idea of too great 
unworthiness to approach Him, of incapacity to address Him in 
words fit for His acceptance, obtain a moment’s resting in the 
female Jewish heart. We are His — His own — and every 
expression in His Holy Word proves that we are so, and that 
now, aye, even now, every woman who bears the glorious name 
of Israel, be she rich or poor — full of good deeds and pious 
thoughts, or bereft of all but a childlike faith and guileless love 
of God — still she has spiritual privileges ; a closer, dearer, more 
blessed connexion with her Father in heaven, than is the lot 
of any woman. She cannot read her Bible without feeling this. 
Oh, let her prove it in the sight of the whole world ! 


CHAPTER IV. 

THE SHUNAMMITE. 

The poor widow so mercifully relieved and blessed, marks 
the social and spiritual condition of the humbler classes of Israel* 


52 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


itish women. We are now about to consider a Jewish female 
in a much higher station. 

In the town of Shunem dwelt one, designated in the Bible a9 
a “great woman,” meaning a woman of rank and consequence, 
to whose hospitable house the prophet Elisha ever turned when 
he passed through the town. It was not the custom of the 
prophets to enter the houses of the great and eat at their luxu- 
rious tables, preferring the humble meal and lowly roof as more 
accordant with their heavenly mission than the good things of 
earth. Not that they resembled the self-mortifying ascetics of 
lome Gentile creeds, and imagined that their merit in the sight 
of God w r as weighed according to the extent of their self-inflicted 
penances ; but simply, that the mind might be kept clearer, the 
spirit poorerj and the body healthier, by moderation in all 
things. Their mission of love, too, was to all classes, and the 
poor could not have come to them with such confidence, as in 
case of the widow, if their luxurious style of living placed them 
with the nobles of the land. 

That to lodge and eat amid the wealthy was contrary to their 
usual habits, we learn from the forcible expression, “ she con- 
strained him to eat bread [bread in Hebrew comprising all 
sorts of food, of course signifies regular meals]. A.nd so it was, 
that as oft as he passed by, he turned in thither to eat bread 
and in so doing, it is evident that he found the Shunammite, 
one of “ the seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to 
Baal nor kissed him,” and accepted her hospitality in the same 
spirit of piety and kindly love with which it was proffered. 

Once he had been constrained , for the prophet might have 
feared that the wealth and luxury which marked the abode 
was impregnated with the same awful seeds of vice and impiety 
which desecrated the wealthy of the capital ; but a second time 
he needed not constraint, for one interview sufficed to mark the 
spiritual elevation of his hosts, and that they were indeed those 
with whom a prophet of the Lord might enjoy the delights of 
social intercourse in innocence and peace. 

Not content with proffering the mere hospitality of rest and 
food, we find the Shunammite saying to her husband, “ Behold 
now, I know this is a holy man of God which passeth by 
continually. Let us make him a little chamber, I pray thee, in 
the wall ; and let us set for him there a bed, and a table, and 
« stool, and a candlestick : and it shall be, when he cometh to 


PERIOD IV. THE SHUNAMMITE. 53 

ns, that he shall turn in thither.” And we know that her 
husband’s acquiescence was instantly obtained, and her plan 
accomplished ; for the very next verse we read, “ And it fell on 
a day that he came thither, and he turned into the chamber 
and slept there.” 

I Briefly as this is related, how beautifully it illustrates the 
f character of woman — the eager desire to show kindness, and so 
to show it as best to harmonize with the feelings and habits of 
its object. The establishment was probably the highest and 
most influential in Shunem. The Shunammite was an indepen- 
dent mistress of her own household, possessed of power to ask 
whom, and to do what she willed ; she is the prime mover in 
the whole narration ; and she it is to whom the reward is given, 
as the one from whose pure mind and noble heart the hospi- 
table. kindness originally came. 

That she did not at first know Elisha as a prophet, does but 
enhance the mild benevolence of her character. There was 
nothing in his appearance to mark superior rank or superior 
endowments ; nothing probably but a gentle courtesy of man- 
ners which marked him worthy of kindness and attention. That 
they would ever be returned, she could not for a moment sup- 
pose, for the stranger was evidently a wanderer, with no settles 
home or calling. But true benevolence never thinks of further 
recompense than the act of showing kindness brings. It is 
wrong to suppose that benevolence is but synonymous with acts 
of charity to the poor and needy. It finds space for its encou- 
ragement in every social and domestic duty of life. Benevo- 
lence to equals appears almost a paradox ; yet it is not : foi 
were such more often proved, in the earnest search after one 
another’s social happiness, in acts of daily kindness, and ever 
active fellow feeling, how much happier might this life be ! 

It was this rare and beautiful benevolence which the Shu- 
nammite so richly possessed, and which is still more forcibly 
displayed in building a chamber for the man of God, than in 
her first hospitality. A very few interviews probably convinced 
her that he was something beyond that which he appeared 
and the prophet’s own lips might have told the rest, or at least 
have imparted that his mission was of God. The bustle and 
varied scenes of a large establishment were no fit home for one 
who, when not employed in the service of his fellow-creatures, 
passed his time in meditation and prayer. Even a chamber to 


54 


THE WOMEN OF 


SKAEL. 


himself within the house would not have permitted him the 
privacy he desired, besides causing him to diverge from the 
plan of moderation and retirement, demanded from him as a 
prophet and a reprover, by act as well as word, of the far- 
spreading vices of the time. 

To remedy this, and silently tempt his sojourning a longer 
time with them than the mere acceptance of a meal, the Shu- 
nammite’s ready mind conceived the idea of erecting a chamber 
expressly for him, with an egress and ingress of its own, and fur- 
nished with that kindly regard to all, which might make him 
look upon it as his own. Her plan was, of course, imparted to 
her husband, and how clearly does her simple expression, “ Let 
us make a little chamber, I pray thee,” evince the affectionate 
confidence only found when husband and wife are equals ; even 
though, by a succeeding verse, we are led to suppose that her 
husband was very much older than herself. 

The chamber was built and furnished ; and greatly must 
Elisha have been surprised and affected by this proof of regard. 
We find him, in truth, making no remark ; but how deeply he 
felt it, we learn by his desiring his servant the following morn- 
ing to “ call the Shunammite.” Call her ? Why, had she not 
been in the chamber to give him welcome, and bid him look on all 
around him as his own ? No. Her truly refined and feminine 
nature shrank back from obtruding herself upon the prophet, 
and so compelling thanks and approbation. She wished him to 
feel the comfort of a retired and private home, but not that he 
owed her obligation : and so she kept aloof, demanding no more 
than her own heart gave, in the delightful thought that it was in 
her power to add to the comfort of a man of God. 

And in this eager desire to reverence and serve the prophet, 
can we not read the love she bore to God ? To mere earthly 
natures Elisha would have been nothing more than any other man 
— except perhaps exciting the emotions of dislike and dread with 
which those persons are ever regarded, whose lives and even 
characters are the reprovers of our own ; but to those who truly 
and earnestly seek to love God, His ministers are especial objects 
of reverence and care • and such was the feeling of the Shunam- 
ciite. 

“ Behold ! thou hast been careful for us, with all this care,” 
was the address of Gehazi, by his master’s command ; “ what is 
lo be done for thee ? wouldst thou be spoken for to the king, o? 


PERIOD IV. THE SHUNAMMITE. 65 

to the captain of the host ? And she answered, I dwell among 
mine own people.” 

And what a volume of feeling is contained in these brief words ! 
Not only a perfect contentment with her lot, but a meek and sor- 
rowful reproach, that they could think she had shown this care 
in the hope of reward. Nothing can be more painful to a deli- 
cately feeling mind, than the idea of receiving return for aught 
of kindness : the heart glowing with its own warmth, with the 
peculiar pleasure of serving another, shrinks chilled into itself, 
feeling how completely it is misunderstood ; how little its pure 
motives can be appreciated. Some natures would have been 
indignant at the supposition that she could not do a kind deed 
without reward ; but the character of the Shunammite permit- 
ted not the expression of the feeling. Her lip was closed, but 
her heart was full. Expostulation with Gehazi at the injustice 
of the motive attributed to her, or acceptance of the offer, were 
alike contrary to the retiring dignity of her character ; and 
simply saying, “ I dwell among mine own people,” she retreated 
hastily, as desirous the conference should be closed ; but Elisha 
was not satisfied. He himself, probably, did full justice to the 
pious motives which had actuated her ; but he wished to make 
publicly manifest that no action engaged in out of pure love of 
God and reverence to His ministers, should pass without rew r ard ; 
and on hearing from Gehazi that her husband was old and she 
had no child, De again summoned her, and this time into his 
immediate presence. 

It was, no doubt, with some little repugnance she obeyed ; 
fearing that her sensitive feelings might again be wounded by a 
proffer of service whi ;h she had so fully resolved not to accept. 
And “ when he had called her, she stood at the door” — how 
impressively betraying her reluctance ! She could not refuse to 
speak with her guest ; but, with that mixture of humility and 
real dignity which the true-feeling woman know r s so well how to 
blend, she waited his commands on the threshold of his apart- 
ment. 

This time, however, no offer of reward chilled and saddened 
her. The prophet asked not, sought not, the expression of her 
wishes ; but at once promised, “ Thou shalt embrace a son” — a 
child, a son ! Should she indeed possess that for which, as a 
woman of Israel in the oLen time, she must so often have long- 
ed, though the wish was never uttered ! and, in the fulness of 


56 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


her sudden joy, the promise seemed too precious for belief, “Nay, 
my lord, thou man of God, do not lie unto thine handmaid !’ 
Sti 1 !, even in that moment, we trace the same gentle self-posses* 
sion which had characterized her answer to Gehazi. No burst 
of rapture, no triumph, as would have been had she looked to 
her hospitality to bring reward. No ; while her whole heart 
must have so trembled with the suddenly awakened hope and 
joy, that steady thought was impossible, yet she spoke calmly, 
Beeking to strengthen her faith in the promise, by the recollec- 
tion it was in truth a “ man of God who spoke,” even while she 
besought him not to deceive her — the very entreaty proving how 
earnestly and how long she had yearned for such a blessing. 

Doubt of the power of the Eternal to bring the promise to 
pass, it is evident, never assailed her. Her words to the prophet 
sprang merely from a too sudden thought of joy, and the antici- 
pation was fulfilled ; for at the proper season, exactly in accord- 
ance with Elisha’s promise, she embraced a son. 

Can we not picture the increase of domestic love and happi- 
ness which this infant treasure must have created in the Shu- 
nammite’s happy household ? All we read of her, marks her 
the very character to enjoy to the full the intense happiness of 
maternal love, in its highest and most spiritual sense — one whose 
years passed in deeds not w r ords ; who would enshrine deeply iD 
her own heart those pure emotions and high feelings from which 
the simplest action sprang, — one whose best resources had ever 
been independent of all outward excitement, and who, “ dwell- 
ing among her own people,” had not a thought nor ambition 
beyond Her home w f as the shrine which knew her best, and 
from which the mild light of kindness and benevolence emanated 
many roods around. To such a one, life, even when childless, 
could never have been sad ; yet how many a lonely moment, a 
yearning thought unspoken, uncomplained of, yet still her own 
must have been filled with the irrepressible gush of tenderness 
called forth by her child ! How inexpressibly sweet must have 
been the holy task of leading that infant heart to God, and in 
the very midst of national sin and misery training him for hea- 
ven ! Can we not fancy her strong affections concentrating their 
force and intensity around her boy, and lifting up her whole soui 
in increased adoration to her God ? 

Nine or ten years might have thus passed ; and her love and 
care seemed blessed in the growth and improvements of hei 


PERIOD IV. THE SHUNAMMITE. S') 

child. He was now old enough to leave his mother’s side, and 
sometimes accompany his father in his agricultural employments. 
We can imagine him, in his innocent glee, running from field to 
field, and eagerly sharing every rural occupation. A sudden 
stroke, either from the burning heat of the sun or some other 
cause, arrested his boyish joys, and, clinging to his father, he 
could only utter, “ My head ! my head !” Imagining it only a 
slight pain, which would soon pass, his father desired one of his 
men to carry him to his mother ; “ and when they had taken 
him and brought him to his mother, he sat on her knees till noon 
and died.” 

What a sudden and awful change! A few orief hours 
previous, the fond mother had parted with her darling in full 
health and glee, and he was brought back to her pale, suffering, 
powerless — only sufficiently sensible to cling to her neck and 
lay his burning head upon her bosom. And she sat still, 
calm — apparently unmoved — lest the faintest display of her 
uncontrollable agony should increase his suffering, or disturb him 
as he lay. That every aid possible to be obtained to alleviate the 
disease was sought, we cannot doubt ; but the mother moved 
not, nor w r ould she have her child removed, whilst life remained. 
And when we read this, shall we say the narratives of the Bible 
enter not into the emotions of the present day; that the 
characters there represented are of a nature utterly distinct from 
ours ? What mother, more especially of an only child, can read 
the brief record of “ they brought him to his mother, and he 
sat on her knees and died,” without sympathy ; and as she 
pictures the sad scene in her fancy, without feeling that human 
nature, alike in sorrow or joy, is in all ages the same ; and that, 
therefore, the Bible records do indeed concern her, for they speak 
of characters in all their strength and weakness, faults and 
virtues, like her own ? 

No sound of wailing, no murmur of complaint, escaped the 
mother^ lips, as the breath of life passed from that loved form ; 
as those sweet eyes, still fixed on her, became dim and lustreless, 
and even the faint moan ‘of infant suffering no longer met her 
ear. “ She rose and went up, and laid him on the bed of the 
man of God, and shut the door upon him, and went out. Am 
glia called to her husband, and said, Send me, I pray thee, one 
of the young men and one of the asses, that I may run to the 


58 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


man of God and come again. And he said, Wherefore 
wilt thou go to him to-day? it is neither new moon nei 
Sabbath. And she said, It shall be well.” 

Here, again, is woman brought before us in her highest and 
loveliest nature. A weak mind would have only felt , not 
acted ; would have been so overwhelmed with agony, as to have 
been incapable of any thought but the affliction which had 
befallen her. Hot so the Shunammite ; sustained by that noble 
energy, that perfect self-control, which had characterized he' 
whole life, this trial cannot disturb the beautiful harmony of he* 
character. Even to her husband she is silent as to their heavr 
affliction, and she evades his question ; — whilst there is hope, — 
aye, and to her faithful heart there is hope even now, though the 
child is dead — she will not afflict her husband. The full tide of 
grief is laid up in her own breast, aside from herself. Till she 
has acted , she has no time to sit down and weep, though her 
throat is dry and her breath impeded. We read the unutterable 
agony in her movements, not her words — “ she saddled an ass 
and said to her servant, Drive on, and go forward, slack not tin 
riding for me, except I bid thee.” What was to her the heat 
the fatigue of this unusual journey ? She had but one thought 
the man of God. He alone who had promised her “ a chile’ 
from the Lord,” could have the power, by prayer, to restore hire 
even from the dead. One recollection only mingles with the 
thought, Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. Had not her 
child been restored from the dead ? and had not Elisha equa> 
power with the gracious Lord? Without this thought, this- 
faith , :ke mother must have sunk; for minds like hers ever 
prostrate the frame. Team and complaints give relief : it is the 
heart which never breathes its grief that bows the body to tht 
dust. And not alone the power of Elisha was uppermost in her 
mind; she must have known, have perfectly realized the 
attributes of Elisha’s God, or the thought of the prophet would 
have been no comfort. She must have felt that God was love 
had compassion and sympathy even for her individually , e 
woman, a mere speck in this creation, or how could she have 
believed that He would grant His prophet the power to relieve 
! ier ? She knew, as all believing Israel did, that prophets were 
mere instruments in His Almighty hand, of themselves powerless 
spiritless, as their less favored brethren. And, therefore, thal 


PERIOD IV. THE SHDNUMITE. 59 

the Shunammite had a man of God through whom to seek, does 
not in any way prevent the example from bearing upon us. We 
have not Elisha, but we have still Elisha’s God. 

The way was not very long ; but oh ! the interminable period 
it must have felt to that poor mother’s heart, till Mount Carmel 
was reached ! And how could she know the holy man was 
there ? for he was a wanderer through Judea. But the impulse 
leading in that direction was of the Lord ; and even before her 
dim eyes discovered the Prophet, he had recognised her afar off ; 
and, surprised, bade Gehazi run to meet her, and ask if it were 
well with her, and her husband and child ? thus demonstrating 
how kindly and lovingly the human emotions were ever at work 
in the heart of the holy man. But to Gehazi she could give no 
reply, save as she had said before to her husband, “ It is well 
hers was no grief to speak to indifferent ears. None but Elisha 
could assist her, and her heart was too closely wrapt in its own 
anguish to open to any but to him. Yet what stern command 
must she have had over her woman’s nature to retain her 
calmness during this journey ! Control never failed her, till she 
beheld the man of God, and sank almost powerless at his feet. 
She had reached him, indeed; but the energy which had 
sustained her throughout, seemed deserting her. She had no 
power to utter the entreaty with which her heart was filled. She 
could only clasp his knees, and gaze on his face, in agony, till 
roused br the kindly gentleness with which the prophet 
reproved Gehazi for seeking to thrust her aside. “ Let hei 
alone,” he said, “ for her soul is vexed within her ; and the Lord 
has hid it from me, and has not told me.” Then she said, “ Did 
I desire a son of my lord ? Did I not say, Do not deceive me ?” 
The mother could not say her boy was dead. Faith was strong 
within her that he would be saved ; and how powerfully does 
the very form of her address to the prophet betray the depth, the 
intensity of her feelings : refusing, even to him, to give vent to 
the torrent of grief and lamentation, and even of reproach, which 
would have burst forth unrestrainedly from a weaker and less 
superior mind. 

Elisha needed no further information; and promptly he 
desired Gehazi to take his staff, and neither loiter nor speak by 
the way, till he had laid it on the face of the child. But this 
was not sufficient for the poor mother. “ As the Lord liveth, 
and as thy soul liveth,” she implored, “ I will not leave thee.” 


30 1HE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

None could be to her as Elisha, and he rebuked her not, noi 
denied her; his heart was too full of kindly emotions, and he 
arose and followed her. 

But not to Gehazi was such a miracle vouchsafed ; his com- 
ing to meet his master with the information, “ the child s net 
awake,” probably first convinced Elisha the event was of the 
Lord, and that the necessary power would be granted him. 
The restoring the dead was a greater miracle than he had yet 
performed ; and as we find him saying, “ The Lord hath hid it 
from me, and hath not told me,” he perhaps at first supposed 
that the child was merely in a stupor resembling death, and 
the virtue of the prophetic staff would revive him. But 
Gehazi’s words proved to him that the child was really dead ; 
and he quickened his steps, and hastened to his own chamber, 
where the child lay, “ and shut the door upon the twain, and 
grayed unto the Lord .” Words, how full of important mean- 
ing ! In every other action of the prophet we find the pro- 
phetic spirit acting, as it were, instantaneously. The power 
intrusted to him for the good of the Eternal’s chosen, as for the 
punishment of the unrighteous and disobedient, had seemed 
ready at his word. In this it was no consequence of his super- 
human endowments, but simply the effect of prarjer unto the 
Lord. He might foretell events, might multiply oil, render 
poison harmless ; so feed a hundred men with twenty loaves, 
and a few baskets of first fruits, that they were not only satis- 
fied, but left thereof! might bid iron swim, and know what the 
king said in his bed-chamber, though hundreds of miles away ; 
bui life and death were laid up with the Lord, and prayer only 
gave him power over the human frame.* 

What a tumult of contending emotions must have oppressed 
the Shunammite during that awful interval ! Let any anxious 
mother recall the time when the darling of her heart has been 
pronounced sick unto death — that there is no hope — death is 
fast approaching, when, in the wild agony of her despair, she 
has refused belief in the skill of him who has thus spoken, and 
eent or flown for the first physician of the age, and led him 
to the chamber of her child, and left him there, without the 
power of waiting for his decisive mandate, and then sunk 
prostrate in her own closet before her God, seeking to pray, but 


As is furthci displayed very strikingly in 2 Kings vi. 17, 18. 


PERIOD IV. THE SHU3JAMMITE. 


61 


fading her words trembling, fearing, hoping, and only con- 
scious that life and death are with the Lord, and, if He willed, 
the skill she had so wildly sought might save her darling still. 
Let any mother recall such periods of her life, and she may 
enter into the feelings of the Shunammite, as she sat alone in that 
interval of suspense, for her husband, still out in his agricultural 
employment, knew not of the suffering at home, and she had 
now none to look to in her agony, save her God. 

Time passed ; how long she knew not, save that she felt as if 
an age were passing over heart and head. Hush ! Is it the 
prophet’s voice ? The mother started from her prostrate 
prayer, her head flung back, her very breath ceasing. u Call 
this Shunammite,” seemed to have rung in her ears ; but it 
might be only fancy, only the mocking torture of her bewil- 
dered brain. No ! Gehazi is at her door — he calls her to his 
master, though he says not wherefore, and she does not look 
upon his face to read his tidings there. She stood within the 
prophet’s chamber — she glanced upon the bed — her boy lived, 
breathed, smiled, stretched out his arms to her once more, and 
the voice of the prophet spake, “ Take up thy son.” And she 
sought to obey ; but the spirit which had sustained her in 
sorrow, in suspense, departed now, and she fell at his feet 
powerless, voiceless, conscious only that her child lived — that 
the prayer of Elisha, and the compassionate love of Elisha’s God, 
had given her back the dead. 

And even when she recovered sufficiently to bow herself to 
the very ground, in silent acknowledgment of the power of 
Elisha, the mercy of her God, and, with her living child clasped 
to her bi^som, retired from the chamber, leaving the man of 
God to the adoration and meditation which this great mercy 
called, still no word broke from that heart, so swelling in thank- 
fulness ai;d love that only tears might relieve it ; and beautifully 
does this stillness continue to illustrate the character of this 
sweet and gentle woman, so controlled, so energetic in affliction, 
so calm, so still in joy — so full of deep, of intense feeling, sensi- 
bility, affection, yet so restrained within, that though all around 
her felt its blessed effects, alike in deed, and word, and man- 
ner, none knew its extent save her God. 

Blessed as must have been the little domestic circle of the 
Shunammite before, it must have been thrice blessed from the 
restoration of her child. What must have been the feelings of 


62 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


the husband and the father on his return, when told that, in s<$ 
short a space, his treasured child had been snatched from him 
by death, and been restored ? How must his heart have 
glowed in increased love and veneration for the gentle woman, 
who, rather than expose him to the agony of such intelligence, 
had buried it all in her own breast ; and sought the prophet 
alone and unsoothed, and, through that energetic promptness, 
had been a lowly instrument in the hands of the Lord for the 
restoration of her child ! Had she lingered in unavailing and 
probably complaining sorrow — had she permitted herself to fail 
in faith and prayer — she had not sought the prophet, nor would 
her child have been restored, for she would have been no fit 
receiver for such manifestation of almighty love. 

The character of the Shunammite was not one to change or 
waver. We find her, at a later period, displaying the same 
retiring gentleness, yet dignified self-possession and energetic 
will. Some years must have passed, and from there being no 
mention of the Shunammite’s husband in affairs which, had he 
been living, would have devolved upon him, not on her, we 
infer that she had become a widow, an inference confirmed by 
the previous statement that “ her husband was old.” 

Elisha had never lost sight of her, but had probably continued 
to occupy the “ little chamber,” whenever he passed through 
Shunem. He advised a removal, which must have been both 
irksome and painful to one whose house had always been on one 
spot, and whose richest possessions consisted of the land, and 
flocks, and herds around it, which she could not carry away 
with her, nor for the safety of which provide. However, she 
had too much faith and trust to hesitate in obedience ; and 
when the mandate of the prophet came, “ Arise, and go thou 
and thine household, and sojourn wheresoever thou cans* 
sojourn : for the Lord hath called for a famine ; and it shall also 
tome upon the land seven years,” she unhesitatingly “ arose, 
and did after the saying of the man of God : and she went 
with her household, and sojourned in the land of the Philistines 
seven years.” A sojourn which would have been inexpressibly 
sad to such a true follower of Israel, had she not been cheered 
by the blessed thought of the Eternal’s continued care for her. 
What was she in His sight ? and yet, even by His prophet, He 
had deigned to warn her of the evil about to ensue, and provide 
for her safety, by permission to sojourn whithersoever she 


would. In those seven years of exile, how much must have 
devolved on her to keep her son and her household faithful, and 
live as if they were still in their own land, and still guided by 
the counsels of the man of God ! Can we not fancy the morn- 
ing and evening prayer arising daily from that little circle of 
faithful hearts led by a woman’s voice, and the Sabbaths and 
the festivals marking that lowly home a sanctuary before the 
Lord ? Oh ! if the heart be but true to its God, it matters little 
where its home is cast. The magnet points unfailingly to its 
answering star wheresoever the vessel glides. In tempest or 
calm, in cold or heat, it wavers not, or fails to guide aright ; and 
so is it with the man whose heart, like the magnet to the pole, 
is fixed upon its God. 

At the end of the seven years, the Shunammite and her 
household returned to Judea ; but her home and land had been 
seized during her absence, and apparent ruin and privation in 
consequence was her welcome home. Some would have been 
ready to accuse Elisha as the cause of the evil, as having 
advised her removal. Others, again, would have demanded, oi 
at least depended on, the prophet’s influence with the king. 
The Shunammite felt and did neither. With calm self-posses- 
sion she went herself to make her complaint before the king, 
and demand her house and land. This was no service in which 
Elisha’s spiritual ministry was needed. It was no favor for 
herself, no advancement for her boy. The heart which had 
once answered, “ I dwell among mine own people,” to offers of 
reward, had not changed. As a woman and a widow in Israel, 
her sole plea was the justice of her cause. 

But though with true feminine delicacy she had shrunk from 
appealing to Elisha in this emergency, the Eternal had so 
ordered events, that the prophet was in fact the true cause of 
the king’s instant attention to her suit. It so chanced that the 
king was talking to Gehazi, and demanding a recital of the great 
things i’lisha had done ; and at the very time the young man 
was repeating the restoration of the dead child, the Shunammite 
herself appeared before the king, led into his presence by that 
very beloved child, now grown into manhood, of whom Gehazi 
spoke. u Behold, my lord, O king,” he exclaimed, “ this is the 
woman, and this is her son, whom Elisha restored to life. And 
when the king asked the woman, she told him.” And so 
strong an impression did the narrative make, that without hesi 


6 4 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL, 


tation he appointed unto her a certain officer, saying, “ Restore 
all that was hers, and all the fruits of the field, since the day that 
she left the land, even until now.” 

Gratefully must the Shunammite have recognised the hand of 
God in this instant judgment, from one whose character was 
noted for impotence and indecision — one whose very justice was 
ever likely to be sullied by caprice ; for though we are 
expressly told in Holy Writ that Jehoram’s character was not 
of the actively evil, as his father and his mother, Ahab and 
Jezebel, his whole history marks him one of those faineants, 
whose indolence and weakness wrought a 1 most as much evil in 
Israel as wickedness itself. 

The energy which had urged the prosecution of her suit was 
indeed rewarded. Not only were all her possessions restored, 
but their full value, during her seven years of absence. Through 
her exertions, her boy received his inheritance ; and from his 
non-interference, though he must have been quite of an age to 
assert bis own right, what a powerful proof have we of the deep 
veneration in which the mothers of Israel were regarded by 
their sons ! We hear no more of the Shunammite ; but we 
have become sufficiently intimate with her sweet character to 
picture her declining years, full of piety, of that calm and 
beautiful dignity, which, if woman’s in her youth, will never 
forsake her in her age. Full of love to God and man, of good 
deeds and blessed thoughts, it was for her, and for seven thousand 
such as her, who had not bowed the knee to Baal, that the Eter- 
nal, in his loving mercy, still restrained His avenging wrath. 

The peculiar charm of the Shunammite’s character is its 
unity, its harmonious blending of parts. In every position, 
adversity or prosperity, or that period of often greater trial than 
either — the uninterrupted routine of daily life — still we see her 
in the same calm and beautiful light, never turning aside from 
the beaten path of duty, never seeking more than the day may 
bring, and finding enough there, not only to occupy her, but to 
giye her grace and favor in the sight of God. But though 
never apparently disturbed, her calmness was not indifference. 
All that we read of her betrays an under-current of intense 
feeling, which, while it caused her to suffer deeply, also endowed 
her with the purest susceptibility to joy. Feeling it was, that 
inspired that constantly working energy which never permitted 
her to sit down and weep when she could act, or remain satis- 


PERIOD IV. THE SHUN AMM1TE . 


65 


Wi with the mere expression of kindness, when she could 
manifest it in deed : and of that intensity of feeling, piety was 
the spring. No heart can rest indifferent when once awakened 
to a love of God, and, as must follow, a love of man. It was 
with no thought of reward she showed such warm hospitality to 
Elisha, yet from that one deed all her after-happiness sprang. 
He was the chosen servant of the Eternal ; and a service done 
to him was an offering to his God. From first to last, the 
character of the Shunammite offers the beautiful lesson of exam- 
ple. Her good use of wealth and greatness — her moderation in 
all circumstances — dier firmness in affliction — her absolute 
control of every emotion till her child was restored — her unself 
ish endurance of anxiety and anguish, rather than impart them 
to her husband — her calm, yet energetic prosecution of her son’s 
rights — all these are points which every young daughter of 
Israel may admire and imitate, even though her position in life 
be different. We must exercise energy and self-control in little 
things, even in daily employments, or we shall never find them 
when most needed. We must set out in life with a conviction 
that w r e are destined for something worthier and nobler than the 
mere routine of frivolous employments and unmeaning recrea- 
tions — that we are endowed with a heart and mind, for the 
proper use of which an account will be demanded; and sad 
will it be if we then feel, that the impulses and usefulness ol 
both have been neglected, and opportunities, alike of virtuous 
deeds and beneficial feeling, have long passed us by unused. 

And as women of Israel, even more powerfully should the 
history of the Shunammite aftect us ; her elevated character — 
her domestic and social influence — nay, the very mention of her 
.as a “ great woman ” — the mention of her, instead of her hus- 
band or son, as the principally concerned in the whole narration 
—all convince us that even in such an era of national anarchy 
and discord, the women of Israel were in the full enjoyment of 
all the liberty and privileges, spiritual and temporal, granted 
them in the law of God. Her very piety, which obtained her 
such favor in the sight of God and of His prophet, is unspeak- 
able comfort to us now. She had, indeed, the friendship and 
counsel of a prophet, which we cannot have ; but her piety had 
life and influence at a period of much darker misery and sin, 
and rebellion, and idolatry, than we have to encounter now. 
To retain purity and faithfulness, to walk firmly in the very 


66 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


midst of vast multitudes who so derided all true piety and 
adherence to the law of God as to endanger even personal 
safety, was a position of infinitely harder trial than is ours now. 
The Shunammite’s being blessed with Elisha, raises no barrier 
between us. What the prophets were to the faithful in the 
olden time, the word of the Lord is now to us. We cannot 
too often dwell upon the truth, that the same gracious God 
who manifested Himself through prophets and miracles to our 
ancestors is ours still, and has granted us a record of His words 
and works, to give us strength, and hope, and comfort, till that 
glorious day when we shall be restored to our own land, and 
His almighty presence be again revealed. 

The natural powers and endowments of the Shunammite 
were not superior to woman’s capabilities now ; and, therefore, 
that she found such grace and favor in the sight of God, as for 
Him, in his infinite mercy, to restore her child from the dead, 
should encourage us to follow in the same holy and rejoicing 
path. Events so marked as those in the Shunammite’s history, 
may never be ours ; but the piety of thought and deed is never 
passed unheeded by our God. The Shunammite was one of 
the seven thousand, who alone remained faithful amid countless 
millions. Let each of Israel’s daughters determine to prove 
herself one of the faithful, which in every age is found, unseen, 
unrecognised, perhaps, by man, when mourning over apparent 
universal indifference, and falling away from the rock of right- 
eousness ; but known, recognised, aye, and upheld by God. 
Let her not think that, as a woman, her prayers and deeds are 
unavailing, save perchance unto herself. No ! as a woman of 
Israel, she is one of the supporters of a temple which will last 
for ever ; nationally, as well as individually, she is bound to 
forward the holy cause ; and she may rest assured that hei 
piety and faithfulness, even aj those of man, will hasten M tl* 
great and glor.ous day of the Lord.” 


PERIOD IV. ISRAELITISH MAID. 


07 


CHAPTER V. 

IITTLE ISRAELITISH MAID. HULDAII. — IK« 

FLUENCE OF WOMEN DURING THE MONAR- 
CHY. 

That the Eternal often chooses the weakest and the feeblest, 
through whose unconscious influence to spread a knowledge of 
His ways and works amid the Gentiles, is proved by the men- 
tion of the little Israelitish maid (see 2 Kings v. 2, 3, &c.). In 
one of the predatory excursions of the Syrians into the north of 
Judea, they had carried off, amongst other booty, a little maid, 
who became the property of Naaman’s wife. Naaman was the 
captain of the host of the king of Syria, a man of high rank and 
great valor, who had frequently been the means of deliverance 
to Syria ; but he had become a leper, and was, of course, inca- 
pacitated from all public duties and domestic enjoyments. It 
must have been a sad change to the little maid of Israel ; torn 
from the bosom of her affectionate family, and sold as a slave 
in the service of a heathen. But it is clear, from her recollec- 
tion of Elisha, and her earnest wish that her master would go 
to him to be cured of his leprosy, that she was a child of one 
of the seven thousand faithful, and one who had been tenderly 
and spiritually brought up in the religion of her God ; aijd, 
consequently, with firm faith in the power of His prophets. 
Ws can picture her child-like orisons, rising morning and even- 
ing in the language of her country to Israel’s God, undisturbed 
by the heathen worship with which she was surrounded ; lin- 
gering with fond affection on the memory of her parents, che- 
rishing their instructions in her heart of hearts, and praying to 
God, as they taught her, to keep her undefiled, that she might 
bear witness to His glory. 

The effect of true piety never fails to obtain the love and kind- 
ness of our fellow-creatures. The respectful deference of the 
young slave, her quiet discharge of her duties, her uncomplain- 
ing gentleness, though often visible sadness, had no doubt 
attracted the attention of her mistress, and called forth, not only 


68 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


kindness towards the child, but led her to confide in her her owi 
affliction from her husband’s disease. A peculiar sanctity evei 
surrounded the Hebrews, in the eyes even of many ignorant and 
heathen nations. They were not only the Firstborn of the Lord 
in spiritual privileges ; but, in arts and sciences, and all that 
marked them, almost an age in advance, both in refinement and 
intellect. It is not improbable that the wife of Naaman was 
questioning her young slave as to the treatment of Lepers in 
Judea, of which the child could give her but little information ; 
but all she had heard of Elisha, we may imagine, flashing on 
her mind, the power he had received from the Eternal, the 
miracles he had done, the tender kindness his character had so 
often evinced, caused the instant exclamation, “ Would God my 
lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria ; for he would 
recover him of his leprosy.” There is no hesitation, no doubt 
— the very faith of a child satisfied that it was in his power, and 
he would do it. And so completely did that simple faith enter 
into the hearts of those who heard, that we find not only 
Naaman’s domestics and Naaman himself, but the king of Syria 
acting upon it, the very instant that it was reported, “ Thus, r.d 
thus, saith the maid, who is of the land of Israel.” 

The story of Naaman’s visit to Judea, and miraculous cure, 
does not enter into the plan of this history, much as we should 
delight in dwelling upon it, as so strikingly illustrative of the 
Eternal’s loving-mercy, over all His creatures. Naaman was a 
heathen, and often an enemy to Judea ; yet, when he sought the 
prophet of the Lord, even he was accepted, and a miracle per- 
formed in his behalf. How powerfully should this rebuke us, 
when inclined to pronounce harsh judgment on the religion of a 
fellow-creature, or arrogate to ourselves alone, or to those who 
think exactly with us, the sole care and love of our Creator ! 

How happy must the little Maid of Israel have felt, when she 
beheld her master perfectly cu*ed; and the God of her fathers 
acknowledged and worshipped, as the sole and only one, by 
those who had so lately been heathens and idolators — “ Thy ser- 
vant will henceforth offer neither burnt-offering, nor sacrifice, 
unto other gods, but unto the Lord,” Naaman had declared unto 
Elisha : and when she saw this change, how must the Hebrew 
child have rejoiced ! That all had originated in her confident 
reference to the prophet, she probably never knew ; but we see 
that she was the direct instrument in the Lord’s hand, to bring 


PERIOD IV. ISRAELITISH MAID. 66 

iibout tlie revelation of His power ; she had glorified Him by 
trusting in His prophet, and so made both her God and His 
servant venerated in a Gentile land. But this would not have 
been had she been ashamed to confess her religion and hei 
country before men. A solitary exile in the household of 
Naaman, young, and undirected by man, holier associations 
must have been powerful within her, to have prevented the 
adoption of the forms and customs, and even worship, of those 
around her. The childish faith which caused the exclamation 
and its consequences, as we have recorded, did not spring from 
the mere impulse of the moment, but from the education and 
subsequent thought of early years. That which springs from 
mere impulse would have been startled and terrified at the 
instant acting on the words ; but to the child of Israel, there was 
no fear or doubt. 

If then even a child, a female child, was permitted to be the 
means of bringing a heathen household to a knowledge of the 
only God, shall we not do all we can to make the education of 
our children subservient to the same great end ? Amongst 
heathens and idolators, indeed, we do not dwell ; but thrown, as 
we are so often, into terms of intimacy and kindness with those 
who worship God, though not as we do, it is more necessary 
than ever to infuse a national spirit amongst us ; to inculcate 
into the very youngest of our families, who and what they are 
— that a solemn charge is intrusted to them, as witnesses of the 
Eternal — and that a denial or concealment of our true faith, and 
sacrifice of its ordinances, to assimilate with the world, is a denial 
of God Himself. Let us teach our children from earliest infancy 
to venerate and glory in their faith ; and that faith will be 
respected in them by every Gentile with whom they associate. 
The law of God makes no distinction between the education of 
Bons and daughters, and let us make none ; both are equally 
children of Israel — and both equally heirs of all the spiritual and 
temporal privileges which that holy name includes. Let our 
daughters then feel and glory in their nationality ; and by mak- 
ing the religion of their fathers the mainspring of their being, so 
serve the cause of God, and so elevate the character of Israel, 
that their very exile may hasten the day of our restoration, by 
bringing all the nations to a knowledge of the Lord. The young- 
est child may, like the little maid of Israel, bear witness to the 
truth of her religion, and the power of her God. An infant of 


;o 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


six years once had the moral courage, in the midst of an assem 
blage of Gentile children, and her mother was not present, to 
refuse touching some forbidden food, and wiih childish and most 
touching artlessness to say aloud that they were not allowed to 
eat it. And that infant upheld the sanctity of her religious 
ordinances, and inspired a feeling of respect and admiration, not 
only towards herself, but towards the religion she professed ; and 
this is the practical nationality we should inculcate. Teach a 
child from the first that she is the depositary of a solemn office 
— that she can, in her own proper person, either elevate or degrade 
the religion which her Father in Heaven Himself deigned to give 
— that she is not like the children of the soil, for whom it is 
enough to follow the multitude, and who have advantages of all 
kinds to teach them their religious duty, but one of a peculiar 
and holy faith scattered in every land, exiled and often oppressed, 
yet still the first-born of the Lord ; and, therefore, that it depends 
upon her, even as if she stood alone, to do all she can to raise 
her faith, and its blessed ordinances, in the estimation of the 
whole Gentile world. 

We have now come to a very important character in our 
present period, with little to concern us as women generally, but 
much to encourage us as women of Israel ; and sufficient in 
itself to give a direct denial to the accusation, that the Jewish 
religion utterly prohibits all spiritual and intellectual privileges ; 
and that for a woman to attempt the study of, or instruction in, 
religion, is little less than folly. We have already seen a 
femaie judge and prophetess in the person of Deborah ; but still, 
if she were the only female so mentioned, we might incline to 
the idea that women were thus sanctified only in the very first 
selection of Israel. Such, however, is not the fact; several 
hundred years had passed away — the kingdom of Israel was 
sinking deeper into the abyss of sin. Had there been any 
single portion of the law derogatory to woman, or confining her 
to a mere household sphere, with neither liberty nor inclination 
to employ her intellect and influence, now would have oeen 
the very time for such laws to obtain ascendency; the state 
of society must effectually have prevented her rising against 
it. If, however, we refer to 2 Kings xxii. 11 — 20, also tc 2 
Chron. xxiv. 20 — 29, we shall find a very different picture of 
woman m Israel. 

The wicked kings Manasseh and Amon had been succeeded 


PERIOD IV HULDAH. 


71 


by the youthful Josiali, at the early age of eight years. His 
mother’s name, we are express.y told, was Jebidah, and her 
influence it probably was which so guided and instructed his 
youthful years as to make him very different from his predecessors. 
u He did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, and 
walked in all the way of David his father, and turned not aside 
to the right nor to the left.” In the eighteenth year of his 
reign, he gave orders for the repairing and beautifying of the 
house of the Lord ; and it w r as when obeying this order that 
Hilkiah the high priest found the book of the law, which he gave 
to Shaphan the scribe, who, after reading it, brought it unto the 
king. What an awful picture do these verses present of the 
national apostasy ; that the very high priest should have been 
ignorant of the existence of the book of the law in the house of 
God, and its enactments and prohibitions, of course, never read, 
as was so imperatively commanded, before the people — men, 
women, and children ! The mere formula of high priests, 
scribes, and other officers of the temple, appeared still filled ; but 
what a fearful mockery must it have been before the Lord — the 
mere empty shell, whence all of obedience, and love, and 
spirituality, had departed. 

That the ordinances of the law were utterly disregarded, is 
evident from the effect which the hearing of the law produced 
upon Josiali. He rent his clothes (always a sign of intense 
affliction), and sent instantly the priest, and other superior 
officers, to “inquire of the Lord for me, and for all Judah, 
concerning the words of the book that is found, for great is the 
wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us, because our 
fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book, to do 
according unto all that which is written concerning us.” And 
co whom did these high officers go ? to a mighty man of 
wisdom ? to a holy man of God, whose sanctity and influence 
gave him courage to threaten and to warn, to risk personal 
dangerxfrom the anger of the populace, whom his denunciations 
might enrage ? No ; it was to a woman that they came — a 
woman and a wife in Israel — and yet an inspired prophetess 
of the Eternal, the chosen medium between him and his people, 
the bold denouncer of his wrath, and the truthful reporter of his 
love. 

“ And Hilkiah the priest, and Ahikam and Achbor, and 
Shaphan, and Asaiah, went untc Huldah the prophetess, the 
15 


72 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


wife of Shallum, the son of the keeper of the wardrobe (no* 
she dwelt in Jerusalem in the college), and they communed with 
her” — Now, if the women of Israel were confined entirely to 
their household duties, it is strange that Huldah could have 
obtained admission within the college, which was probably an 
establishment devoted to the study of the law. Her being a 
prophetess does not make an exception in her favor, or render 
her dwelling in the college a necessary consequence. We have 
seen, in the cases of Elijah and Elisha, that the prophets had no 
appointed residence ; but were, generally, wanderers and mere 
sojourners in the various cities of Judea. Deborah judged and 
prophesied under her own palm tree, between Ramah and 
Bethel. Huldah, on the contrary, dwelt in the college ; and 
from the officers of Josiah seeking her without any hesitation, as 
the only one of whom they could inquire of the Lord, we are 
justified in inferring that her wisdom and piety had long been 
known and acknowledged in Jerusalem. 

The prophetic power was never intrusted to the undeserving, 
man or woman ; it was always some superior piety and virtue, 
which originally attracted towards them the loving mercy of the 
Lord, and rendered them worthy to become His messengers. 
No effort after righteousness and virtue, however lowly, passes 
unnoticed in His sight; and His love will ever increase the 
desire after good, and the power to accomplish it. But virtue 
and righteousness were not the only requisites for a prophet ; 
they needed intellect, a profound knowledge of the law and of 
man, and a strong perception of the ways and works of the 
Eternal. Huldah’s dwelling in the college supposes a mind 
anxious and inquiring after the study of the law, and a heart 
yearning to obey every statute therein commanded, while her 
very selection as a prophetess, proves that her spiritual privileges 
and intellectual powers were on a perfect equality with those of 
man. 

Yet from the very circumstance of her only being mentioned 
once in the sacred record, we may be convinced that her solemu 
office interfered not at all with her domestic and conjugal duties, 
and that in no one instance she came unduly forward. Woman's 
natural sphere is to influence, not to command ; to entreat, not 
to threaten ; to lead far more by example than by precept ; and 
every woman, conscious of her own weakness, will rejoice that 
such is the kind of duties assigned her. In the awful condition 


PERIOD IV. HULDAH. 


73 


of Judea, a mind like Huldah’s must have shrunk from coming 
forward. The state of restraint, and subsequent depression, 
which must attend the intercourse of pious and believing hearts, 
with those to whom all of piety and spirituality are utter 
strangers, was probably the original cause of Huldah’s religious 
retirement ; seeking to conquer the suffering which the public 
and private condition of her country occasioned, by quietly 
following the daily routine of domestic duty, and spending every 
leisure hour in learning to know that merciful and gracious God, 
whom Judea seemed to have forgotten. 

Possessed, as she was, of unusual spiritual gifts, her mind 
must have been of no ordinary cast, to allow her remaining 
contented in a retired sphere, without the restless desire to 
become of public service ; her very consciousness of responsibility 
would urge this, without any failing of woman’s native modesty. 
But Huldah waits for the Lord . He who had reposed in her 
a gift so precious would vouchsafe her some sign when to use 
it, and meanwhile her duty was to pray, and meditate, and 
beseech the Eternal to have mercy on His people. And this 
we can all do, though we are not prophetesses ; and we have 
His whole word to prove how much intercessory prayer availeth. 

The sign for which the prophetess awaited, came. The 
highest officers of the state suddenly approached her, and with 
humility and deference reported the sovereign’s message, inquir- 
ing through her the mandate of the Lord. There is neither 
pause nor doubt, as there must have been had she been a mere 
pretender in the prophetic art : the rushing spirit of prophecy 
was poured within her by Him whoso instrument she was, and 
with fearless dignity she answered, “ Thus saith the Lord God 
of Israel : Tell the man that sent you to me, thus saith the 
Lord, Behold, I will bring evil on this place and on the inhabit- 
ants thereof; even all the words of the book which the king 
of Judah hath read; because they have forsaken me, and burnt 
incense tb other gods, that they might provoke me to anger 
with all the works of their hands, therefore my wrath shall 
kindle against this place, and shall not be quenched.” Then, 
softening into the tenderest compassion, still inspired by Him 
who evet tempereth justice with mercy, she continued, “ But 
tc the king of Judah who sent you to iuquire of the Lord, thus 
shall ye say to him, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, As 
touching the news which thou hast heard ; Because thy heart 


n 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


was tender, and thou hast humbled thyself before the Lord, 
when thou heardest what I spake against this place, and against 
the inhabitants thereof, that they should become a desolation 
and a curse, and hast rent thy clothes and wept before me, I 
also have heard thee, saith the Lord ; behold, therefore, I will 
gather thee to thy fathers, and thou shalt be gathered unto thy 
grave in peace, and thine eyes shall not see all the evil which 
I will bring upon this place ; and they brought the king word 
again.” 

Although .this prophecy does not properly belong to a history 
of the women of Israel, we have transcribed the whole, that our 
readers may better judge the full extent of prophetic power 
vouchsafed to Huldah ; and the bold disregard of all, except of 
her mission, which it evinced. “ Tell ye the man who sent ye,” 
she says ; yet she has no disrespect for the Lord’s anointed, she 
was simply uttering the words of the Eternal. The persecution 
of Elijah and Elisha marked the prophetic office one of danger, 
but Huldah felt nothing but the spirit which inspired her ; 
feared nothing but to fail in the calm and dignified boldness 
required of her as the prophetess of the Lord. The high regard 
in which her words were held, is proved by the messengers of 
Josiali “bringing the king word again,” and by his continuing 
his endeavors to render himself worthy of the promised forbear- 
ance of the Eternal, though the threatened evil to his country 
and his people he knew could not be averted. 

We have no further mention of Huldah, nor do we need 
more lor the confirmation of our assertion, that the women of 
Israel enjoyed higher and nobler privileges, in the sight alike 
of God and man, than any other women in the world. Every 
former argument which we advanced in our notice of Deborah, 
is still more strongly applicable to Huldah. One great differ- 
ence there was, which, however, only marks the nation a. eleva- 
tion of women still more forcibly. Deborah lived, and exercised 
her prophetic power, at a time when Israel was under the direct 
guidance of the Lord; Huldah flourished, not thirty years 
before the first captivity, and some centuries after the nation 
had, by their sins, thrown a dark cloud between them and their 
God. The laws and customs, which, according to our oppo- 
nents, have crept in and sullied, if not entirely altered, the pure 
Judaism inculcated by Moses, must have been ascendant during 
the period of which we .are writing. And in conseque* c.e, if 


PERIOD IV. HDLDAH. 


15 


they degraded women, it follows that the domestic and social 
position of the women of Israel must, during the monarchy, 
have given positive evidence of such degradation ; and wo 
certainly should not find a woman dwelling in the college, 
which is synonymous with devoting herself to the study of the 
law, and also as the only one, in the whole nation of Judah, 
who was intrusted with the prophetic power. 

To such a height in spiritual privileges, the women of Israel 
cannot now hope to attain ; but the example of Huldah is suffi- 
cient for them to rest content that the study of the law, and all 
religious observances, as well as the piety of the heart, are now 
equally incumbent on them as on men, and equally acceptable 
before God : and that Israel is the only nation in the wlic’e 
world in which women sufficiently gifted to perform the offices 
of Prophetess and Judge have been found. 

These truths ought to be enough for us ; and the very names 
of Deborah and Huldah serve as shields to guard us against all 
arguments tempting us from the Rock of Ages. We have said 
this often, but we cannot too often or too forcibly impress it on 
the female Hebrew heart. It depends on woman, not alone to 
feel , but to prove its truth ; to shake off all of stagnating 
apathy, all of cold indifference : not to rest satisfied with a due 
performance of their duties as women — even as pious women, — 
but to feel and glory in being women of Israel, and infuse 
the same national spirit within the hearts and minds of their 
children. 

Prophetesses, in our present captive state, we cannot hav*,, 
nor do we need them, till the spirit of our God rests upon us in 
our own fair land once more; but we need the same bold 
uncompromising spirit, the same religious zeal and pious fervor 
which actuated Huldah. Did every woman in Israel determine 
to elevate her faith, and to glorify her God in her own proper 
person, apathy, and that fearful want of nationality too often 
discoverable amongst us, would vanish altogether. We should 
not be content with mere amalgamation with the Gentiles in 
society ; but, without relinquishing the social position which an 
age of superior civilization and refinement has assign’d us, we 
diould still retain our nationality, — still, before man and before 
God, remain Israelites indeed ; and thus compel respect towards 
our faith, and remove not only the prejudices excited by igno- 
rance, but check the zealous efforts of conversionists by convinc* 


78 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


ing them that our constancy, as our religion, must bo indeed 
of God, and therefore no effort of man can turn us from it. 

Nor was it to an unmarried, and therefore more independent 
woman, the prophetic power wa3 granted. We are expressly 
told that Huldah was the wife of Shallum, the keeper of the 
robes ; and we must therefore feel convinced that the marriage 
state in Israel was far from being one of slavery or dependence. 
How she contrived to unite her domestic duties with her divine 
office, holy writ does not inform us ; but there is no doubt that 
both were fully accomplished ; for the chosen messengers of the 
Eternal were ever those actuated by the tenderest human 
emotions, and the earnest desire to serve all the human family. 
We read Huldah’s feminine nature in the fact of her being 
sought in her own dwelling. The condition of Judea must have 
filled her with the deepest suffering, but she left it in the hands 
of her God ; content to perform his mission, when called upon 
so to do, but never forgetting, even in the furtherance of His 
service, the modest and retiring dignity of the woman. 

Aud this is the union we should so strenuously endeavor to 
obtain. More than the females of every other nation, are the 
women of Israel called upon to cultivate their intellect, that 
they may be enabled to comprehend the religion of their 
fathers ; that reason and conviction , as well as love and long 
associations, should bind it on their hearts. Yet that intellect 
must never be obtruded ; never tempt them to quit their own 
holy and beautiful sphere. Woman may have opportunities 
for the study — aye, and the practice — of religion, which man has 
not ; such study will never be in vain ; opportunities of useful' 
ness, of influence, will come to her : she need never seek them 
by the sacrifice of feminine gentleness and retirement ; and man 
will thankfully seek that comfort and even guidance from her, 
which, had they been obtruded on him, he would condemn 
and scorn. 

Oh ! that the history of the past would influence the present ; 
that the women of Israel would feel to their hearts’ core, that 
they are still the same, in the sight of their God, as their 
ancestors of old ; that they have it in their power, individually, 
to hasten that day when “ the earth shall be covered with the 
knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” Piety 
must come from the mind as well as the heart ; and the more 
the intellect is cultivated, the tetter will it enter into the 


PERIOD IV.— FEMALE INFLUENCE. 77 

mysteries alike of Creation and Revelation, of the works, and the 
Word of God ; and the clearer these become, the purer, higher, 
more deeply spiritual, will be the emotions of adoring love, 
uniting the soul with God. We must not rest content with 
mere accomplishment ; we must rise superior to the frivolity and 
excitements which form the existence of some women ; or how 
can wo become worthy, or make our souls worthy, to be once 
more the favored of the Lord ? Women of Israel ! the very 
name should impress our hearts with a solemn conviction of our 
individual responsibility, and urge us on to such spiritual and 
‘ntellectual improvement as will mark us, in the eyes of the 
whole world, as worthy descendants of the first-born of the 
Lord. 

We have now completed our review of the female characters 
contained in the Fourth Period of Jewish History. Our readers 
will, we think, universally agree, that it does not contain a single 
passage, much less a single character or incident, which demon- 
strates the social, domestic, intellectual, and spiritual position 
and endowments of women as enslaved and degraded. There 
is not a hint or allusion to any second law opposed to the written 
one of Moses ; for if there had been, the monarchy lasted 
sufficiently long for it to have obtained such dominion as to 
make manifest its existence. 

That man’s evil and licentious passions had increased to an 
extent so fearful as to demand the captivity of the whole nation, 
is no proof of the imperfection of the law, but only of the 
imperfection of human nature. That the sins of the women 
increased the burden of Israel’s guilt we do not deny, because 
the prophets so inform us. We merely affirm, that the social 
condition of women had not degenerated — that there were no 
laws then degrading and enslaving her : and, therefore, that as 
there were none then, there can be none now , as we acknow- 
ledge no other law of sufficient power to annul or contradict 
those given by the Eternal to Moses, and by him transmitted to 
man. 

This important fact is strongly confirmed by the fearfu. 
wickedness of Jezebel and Athaliah. The former was the 
daughter of a notorious idolatrous king, and the mother of 
Athaliah, consequently we may indulge the comfort of the 
belief that neither was of Israel, and that such awful crimes 
stained not the women whom the Lord so blessed. There is no 


78 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


occasion to bring forward their histories, subjects from which 
no good can be obtained, except that, in the creeping horror of 
the evil and the sin to which woman can attain, the prayer for 
help and strength, and freedom from temptation, may arise 
more frequently from our hearts. The fact of their influence is 
all we need, as confirming the assertion, that woman had both 
power and freedom in the land. Ahab’s natural wickedness 
was fearfully increased, and made productive of still more hor- 
rible evil, by the counsels of his wife, as we must perceive bv a 
very casual glance over his history ; and of Athaliah we are 
expressly told, when speaking of her husband Jehoram, “ that 
he walked in the ways of the kings of Israel, for he had the 
daughter of Ahab to wife , so he wrought that which was evil in 
the eyes of the Lord” And, again, of her son Ahaziah, “ he 
also walked in the ways of the house of Ahab, for his mother 
was his counsellor to do wickedly ” What can more forcibly 
illustrate the power and influence which woman could obtain and 
exercise in Judea ? Had there been any law confining them to 
one particular sphere and debasing employments, not even the 
idolatrous wives and mothers of the kings could have obtained 
such ascendency. Nor was it only through kings, female 
authority was exercised. Athaliah reigned six years sole mistress 
of Judea ; and we may be certain, that however low the nation 
had fallen, however the laws of Moses had sunk into neglect 
and abuse, still, had there ever been any portion of this law 
degrading to woman, Athaliah never would have had either the 
means of making herself queen, or supporting so high a dignity, 
even for the short space of six years. 

The very fact, then, of there being such characters as Jezebel 
and Athaliah, is unanswerable confirmation of the freedom and 
equality of woman, because though they were not women of 
Israel , their union with the Hebrew kings subjected them to 
all the restrictions of the Mosaic law ; and had that law made 
them slaves, they would not have exchanged their liberty in 
their own idolatrous countries for conjugal thraldom in Judea, 
the social and domestic position of the Hebrew females being 
sufficiently well known to them, from the immediate vicinity of 
the land, to prevent any misconception on a subject so important 

And whilst we shudder at this picture of awful wickedness, 
and feel inexpressibly thankful that our merciful God has 
vouchsafed us a law, which, if obeyed, must effectually prevent 


PERIOD IV. FEMALE INFLUENCE. 


79 


the dominion of such evil, let us not turn from it as an over- 
charged portrait, and believe that human nature is incapable of 
such heinous crimes. Alas ! we have only to look into the 
annals of modern history, and even amidst those very nations 
who proclaim themselves so much more enlightened and 
spiritual than the blinded Jew — aye, and within the last four 
centuries we shall find women tempted to follow the same awful 
path, and instigating husbands and sons to the commission of 
crimes and massacres, from which the heart turns with loathing 
sickness, and the vain longing to realize disbelief in the story 
that it reads. And if so lately, comparatively speaking, such 
things have been even in enlightened nations, can we continue 
to think the Bible-picture of woman’s depravity overcharged ? 
Oh ! we know not, we cannot know, the awful effects of 
anlimited authority and unrestrained passions on the weak 
human heart. We can only pray God to guard us from 
positions in which feelings may be aroused of whose very exist- 
ence we dream not now ; to bind closer and closer still His 
blessed law upon our hearts, His spirit on our souls ; to remove 
from us all those evil inclinations and embryo passions which 
His eye may trace, but of which we are unconscious ; to enable 
us to cling closer and closer unto Him in prayer and praise ; 
and we shall be guarded, as by an angel’s wing, from every evil 
thought and evil deed. 


FIFTH PERIOD 


CHAPTER L 

IRE CAPTIVITY. REVIEW OF CHAPTERS ONE 

TO SEVEN OF THE BOOK OF EZRA. SUG- 

GESTIONS AS TO THE IDENTITY OF THE 
AHASUERUS OF SCRIPTURE, AND DATE OF 

HIS ROYAL FEASTS, &C. CHOICE OF 

ESTHER. 

A great and melancholy change had taken place in the 
condition of the Israelites. Their continued disobedience and 
idolatry had, at length, called down upon them the long-averted 
chastisement ; and in the land of their foemen were now their 
mournful dwellings. The great armies of Nebuchadnezzar had 
overrun Judea, and carrying off kings, priests, and people to 
Babylon, left their beautiful land to desolation. 

But even in their captivity, a captivity which their sinfulness 
compelled, God had not forsaken them. AH were not sinful, 
all were no; disobedient, though all alike were exiled, and cap- 
tives in a strange land. Even then the Lord raised up His 
witnesses. The firm constancy of the youthful Daniel and his 
companions, gave them examples of exalted righteousness in the 
very midst of darkness. The glorious visions of Ezekiel, yet 
more bold and sublime in imagery than the visions of any who 
had gone before him, inspired them with hope for the Future, 
and consolation for the Present; while, when the period of 
action came, such men as Ezra, Nehemiah, Zerubbabel, Haggai, 
and others equally earnest, were not found wanting in the fur- 
therance of their holy cause. 

The condition of the exiled Hebrews appears more that of 
colonists than slaves. Allowed to dwell together in large bodies, 
they became at length possessed of considerable property ;* so 

* Milman’s History of the Jews, vol. ii. p. 4. 


PERIOD V. THE CAPTIVITY. 


81 


that many of them refused to return to their own land, even 
when the mandate of Gyrus gave them permission so to do. 
It seemed a strange and painful contradiction, this refusal to 
quit the land of their captivity, when, during that captivity, so 
many had yearned and wept when they “ remembered Zion.” 
Yet, that it was so, and that the return to Judea was by no 
means general, is a convincing proof to us that the universal 
restoration , of which every prophet speaks, is still to be 
fulfilled. 

The chronology, nay, the very personages of the events we 
are about to regard, as identified with those flourishing at the 
same period in Profaue History, are so entangAd and confused, 
that a clear elucidation is impossible. Not only do Jewish and 
Christian chronologists differ as to national dates, but also 
amongst themselves. Josephus, following the arrangement of 
the Bible, plaoes the History of Esther after the books of Ezra 
and Nehemiah. In the Jewish calendar,* Esther’s being made 
queen and saving her people, takes place six years after Cyrus’s 
decree for the return of the Jews ; sixteen or eighteen before 
the building of the second temple and the departure of Ezra ; 
and thirty before the rebuilding of the walls by Nehemiah. 
The chronology at the end of Bagster’s Comprehensive Bible 
rather favors this opinion, — only differing in regard to the 
departure of Ezra, which he states to have taken place only one 
year after Esther’s accession, five before Haman’s plot, and 
thirteen before the petition of Nehemiah. Milman, in his 
history of the Jews, and Gleig, in his history of the Bible, again 
differ ; the former agreeing with the authorities already quoted, 
in placing the migration of the Jews under Ezra, after the acces- 
sion of Esther; and the latter agreeing with Josephus in placing 
him before it. 

Now, in alluding to these differing authorities, let it be 
remembered, that we do not interfere at all with the grand 
question at issue between Jews and Christians, viz. the correct 
data of the creation of the world ; the one placing it 3760, the 
other 4004 before the Christian era.f The Jew has demonstra- 

* By E. H. Lindo, Esq. 

t Even these are disputed : The Samaritan Pentateuch asserts the 
date of the creation to be 4700 B.C. ; the Septuagint, 5372 ; Scaliger. 
3950 ; Petavius, 3984 : Dr. Hales, 5411 r the Talmudists, 5344 (1) Sei 
note to Bagster’s Comprehensive Bible, p. 1339. 


32 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


tion of liis correctness quite sufficient to satisfy himself, and 
prevent all adoption of the Christian supposition. All we wish 
to do, is to make the book of Esther clearer as to time and 
characters, and more connected with the books of Ezra and 
Nehemiah than is generally supposed. As, on a very careful 
consideration of the subject, both in itself, and in connexion 
with Profane History, our own opinion differs from all the 
authorities above mentioned, we will state it openly, as also our 
reasons for holding it — not at all compelling others to adopt it, 
nor as supposing it positively correct, but merely a suggestion 
founded on a careful study of the time. To bring it clearly 
forward, we must throw a cursory glance on the first six chapters 
of the book of Ezra. 

The first chapter contains the celebrated proclamation of 
Cyrus ; who, we are expressly told, was “ stirred up by the spirit 
of the Lord,” that is, the Lord put it into his heart to have 
mercy on the Jews ; informing us also, that the heads of the 
tribes of Judah and Benjamin, Priests and Levites, all whose 
spirit “ God had raised,” gladly hastened their return, bearing 
with them all the vessels of gold and silver of which Nebuchad- 
nezzar had spoiled the temple, but which Cyrus now restored. 
In the second, we learn the number that return, their names, 
substance, and offerings : in the third, the exertions of Jeshua, 
Zerubbabel, and their brethren the high priests, in preparing 
for the work of the temple, setting up first an altar on which to 
offer the usual evening and morning burnt-offerings ; the cele- 
bration of the feast of the tabernacle, new moons, and all the 
feasts of th3 Lord ; in the second year of their return to Judea, 
and in the second month, the solemn foundation of the temple 
with shouting and with joy, mingled with the mourning of those 
who yet remembered the first house of the Lord, “ so that the 
people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the 
noise of the weeping of the people.” In the fourth, we have 
the painful hindrance of the building by the adversaries of the 
Jews — their letter to Ahasuerus, king of Persia — and the royal 
prohibition to continue the building of the temple, believing it 
detrimental to the Persian power, by giving too much sway into 
the hands of the Jews. The Ahasuerus of the sixth verse of this 
fourth chapter is evidently Cambyses, son and successor of 
Cyrus — not the Ahasuerus of the time of Esther. In Profane 
History, we are told that he di fl not openty revoke the edict of 


PERIOD V. REVIEW OF EZRA. 


83 


hi;: lather Cyrus ; but greatly frustrated its execution, by many 
annoyances levelled against the Jews. This underhand kind of 
working is implied in the verse before us, which merely mentions 
the writing to the king an accusation against the inhabitants of 
Judah and Jerusalem. 

The Artaxerxes of the next verse is not the same sovereign, 
but the Smerdis of Profane History, the brother and successor 
of Cambyses ; who, not satisfied with secretly frustrating the build- 
ing of the temple, openly revoked the decree of Cyrus, and sent 
such letters to the adversaries of the Jews, as to make them “ go 
up in haste to Jerusalem, and the Jews, and made them to cease 
by force and power.” “ Then ceased the work of the house of 
God, which is in Jerusalem ; so it ceased until the second year 
of the reign of Darius, king of Persia.” 

This tallies exactly with the dates and names of Profane 
History. Smerdis, suspected to be an impostor, was dethroned 
and murdered, and Darius Hystaspes elected in his room. 

In the reign of Darius, we find, bv the fifth chapter of Ezra, 
the prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Iddo, prophesying to the 
Jews that were in Judah and Jerusalem ; and, encouraged by 
this manifestation that the spirit of the God of Israel was still 
at work, Zerubbabel and Jeshua urged and helped the people 
again to set forward the work, disregarding even the threatening 
questions of Tatnai and Shetliar-boznai ; and “ the eye of their 
God was upon the elders of the Jews, that they should not cease 
till the matter came before Darius.’” A letter was consequently 
written to the king by Tatnai and his companions, stating all that 
had passed between them and the Jews, and concluding by 
entreating the king to let search be made “ whether indeed it 
be so, that a decree was made of Cyrus the king, to build this 
house of God at Jerusalem, and let the king send his pleasure to 
us concerning this matter.” It is clear from the words of this 
letter that some time had elapsed, and divers kings intervened 
since the decree of Cyrus ; the tone is different to that in which 
Bishlam, Mithredath, and others addressed Smerdis — more con- 
ciliating and inquiring — not the determined opposition of the 
previous appeal. The letter, though written by their adversaries, 
served the Jews as fully as if they had appealed to the king 
themselves. 

In the sixth chapter, we find that Darius did make the requi* 
site search for the decree, which was found, and so fully 


$4 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

confirmed tlie statement of the Jews, that Darius instantly pro 
mulgated another decree, not only confirming that of Cyrus, bul 
commanding the adversaries of the Hebrews to let the work of 
this house of God alone, so that the Jews and their governors 
might build it in the place appointed ; and to give them help in 
forwarding the work, and in all that they needed for sacrifice, 
etc. That he who hindered it should be hanged on timber 
taken from his dwelling, and his house be made a dunghill ; “ And 
the God that hath caused His name to dwell there, destroy all 
kings and people that shall put their hands to alter and destroy 
this house of God, which is in Jerusalem. I, Darius, have made 
a decree — let it be done with speed.” 

A decree peremptory as this was of course productive of good. 
The building progressed rapidly : the elders being still more 
encouraged by the prophesying of Haggai and Zechariah : — 
“ And they builded and finished it according to the command- 
ment of the God of Israel, and according to the decree of Cyrus 
and Darius, and Artaxerxes, kings of Persia.” This Artaxerxes, 
though not reigning at the time of the event here recorded, is 
introduced by Ezra, the writer of the book, in compliment to the 
favor he ever showed the Hebrews ; and this Artaxerxes it is, 
who is, in all probability, the Ahasuerus of the book of Esther. 

The remainder of the sixth chapter is devoted to the rejoicing 
of the children of Israel, on occasion of the dedication of their 
temple, the building of which was completed in the sixth year 
of King Darius’s reign ; their offerings ; the establishment of 
their priests, “ as it is written in the book of Moses the solemn 
celebration of the Passover “ seven days with joy” — for they had 
been purified from the filthiness of the heathen, and the “ Lord 
had made them joyful, and turned the heart of the king of 
Assyria unto them, to strengthen their hands in the work of the 
house of God, the God of Israel.” 

So concludes the sixth chapter of the book of Ezra; and 
between that and the seventh, a period of some years must have 
elapsed. Darius reigned thirty-six years ; Xerxes, who succeeded 
him, twelve ; and it was not till the seventh year of Artaxerxes, 
consequently forty -nine after the completion of the building of 
the temple, that Ezra obtained permission from the king to go 
up to Jerusalem, armed with the royal repetition of the decree 
in favor of the Hebrews, and the rebuilding of the city, already 
r romulgated by his predecessors Cyrus and Darius. 


PERIOD V. ESTHER. 


83 


In this interval it appears, then, most probable that the events 
recorded in the book of Esther took place. Whether we believe tho 
Ahasuerus so closely connected with her to be the tyrant Xerxes, 
according to Milman’s view of his character, or Artaxerxes 
Longimanus, according to Josephus and other commentators ; 
still the period of these events remains, unalterably, between the 
sixth and seventh chapters of Ezra, as we have stated before. 

According to the events of Profane History, a period of sixtv- 
three years must have elapsed between the decree of Cyrus for 
the return of the Jews, and the accession of Artaxerxes Longi- 
manus. In the Jewish calendar we find only six. How this 
disparity can ever be reconciled, we know not, and must leave 
it to wiser heads than our own : suffice it, that the events nar- 
rated in the first six chapters of Ezra must have covered a longer 
interval than six years ; but on such a subject our readers must 
search and judge for themselves ; we offer no opinion to be adopt- 
ed as the right one, and will willingly and thankfully receive 
any communication likely to elucidate this difficult point. 

That the events of Esther took place after the decree of Cyrus, 
is, however, a truth on which there can be no dispute ; and 
whatever number of years may have elapsed since the permission 
to return to Jerusalem, it is equally clear that an immense number 
of the Hebrews yet remained scattered over the large dominions 
of Ahasuerus, which we are told “ extended from India, even unto 
Ethiopia, over a hundred and seven and twenty provinces,” 
including, of course, Persia and Media. 

Amongst these was a Jew of noble descent, Mordecai by 
name, a Benjamite by tribe ; consequently, not one of the Ten 
Tribes, but of the two who had faithfully adhered to the royal 
house of Judah. In direct compliance with the law of Moses, 
which had expressly commended the fatherless to the care of 
their coi ntrymen, Mordecai had brought up, as his own child, 
Esther, or Hadassah, the orphan daughter of his uncle, and 
resided with her in an establishment according to his rank, in 
“ Shushan the palace meaning the city which was the usi al 
residence of the king. 

In the third year of Ahasuerus, the city of Shushan was 
thrown into a ferment of excitement, by the royal feasts given 
alike to princes and nobles, and to all the people, and lasting 
several months. The princes of the provinces were present ; to 
whom, we are told, in the scriptural record, all the riches of hia 




THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


glorious kingdom, and the honor of his excellent majesty, were 
lavishly displayed. And this excitement was followed by 
another; — the banishment of Queen Vashti from her royal 
estate, and proclamation made throughout the provinces, that 
all the fairest maidens were to be gathered together unto 
Shushan the palace, from whom the king might select a queen, 
in the place of Vashti. The extreme beauty of Esther, whoso 
very name, in Persian, signifies a star , of course attracted the 
attention of the king’s officers ; and she also “ was brought unto 
the king’s house, to the custody of Hegai, the keeper of the 
women.” 

That this distinction was more painful than pleasing, both to 
Mordecai and Esther, we cannot for a moment doubt: the 
former, whose unwavering faithfulness to his religion has marked 
him amongst the most deserving and distinguished of our 
ancestors, was not likely to have connived at a union for his 
adopted child, which must prevent her strict adherence to her 
father’s faith. That Esther herself was equally repugnant, we 
have the authority of the oldest Jewish writers ; if her prayer 
ir. the Apocrypha be written by them. That the Apocrypha is 
not divine, we are quite aware ; but as the writers of the Talmud 
do not disdain to quote from the “ Wisdom of Solomon,” as a 
good moral essay, not as divine, we may perhaps be permitted 
to regard the remaining chapters of the book of Esther in the 
same light ; as an enlargement or commentary on the Bible- 
record of the same events ; — not that Mordecai and Esther really 
did use the words of prayer which are there put into their 
mouths ; but as a reflection of the opinions of our old writers on 
the subject. 

To resist, or refuse compliance, would of course have been 
vain : and we find Esther wanning such regard from Hegai, 
that he showed her more kindness and respect than to any 
other of her companions. Beauty alone could not have done 
this : for to loveliness, in all its varieties, he had no doubt been 
accustomed. But the cultivated intellect, the spiritual graces, 
of the Hebrew woman, which so marked her superiority over 
the females of every other nation, gave to the mere perishable 
beauty of fiice and form, an interest and a charm unlike every 
other ; and this it was which so powerfully attracted the 
regard of Hegai, and, in due time, the devoted love of the 
king. 


PERIOD V. ESTHER. 


87 


Some time (probably two or three years) must have elapsed 
Detween Esther’s being taken from her adopted father’s care, 
and her public proclamation as queen. It was in the third year 
of Ahasuerus that Vashti was dethroned ; and not till the 
seventh that Esther was raised to the royal dignity in her stead. 
During this interval, “Esther had not showed her people, nor 
her kindred ; for Mordecai had charged her that she should not 
show it” — a charge which appears to us somewhat strange and 
irreconcilable with the constancy and dignity evinced by 
Mordecai, and at a time that, though captives in a strange land, 
concealment of their peculiar tenets was not necessary for their 
safety. But if this part of his conduct be incomprehensible, or, 
at least, unsatisfactory, not so is the paternal affection which is 
forcibly betrayed in the simple words, “ And Mordecai walked 
every day before the court of the women’s house, to know how 
Esther did, and what would become of her.” His child was 
removed from under his own eye, but his watchful love was with 
her; and Esther must have felt comforted in the consciousness 
that he was near her — his thoughts and affections with her 
still. 

And could she need comfort, surrounded as she was with state 
and luxury ? Alas ! these are not the ingredients of happiness. 
Esther had been brought up with the greatest tenderness from 
her earliest years ; from the situation of her people, perhaps, 
educated with even more than usual care in her father’s faith. 
Her affections, habits, associations, all were confined to the house 
of her childhood — the father of her love. Was it nothing, then, 
to be torn from all these by an imperious mandate, and, at a 
moment’s warning, debarred from the exercise of her faith, 
compelled to worship only in her own young heart, with no 
friend near to strengthen and to guide ? Even the very idea of 
becoming queen, had she been one likely to be dazzled by so 
nigh a dignity, must have been fraught with terror, when she 
recollected the fate of her predecessor. 

Thoughts like these were quite sufficient to have clouded the 
heart and mind of Esther, and rendered the change in her 
earthly lot more sad than joyous. But, from the favor she 
-eceived, it is evident that she did not allow herself to murmur; 
the buoyancy of youth, too, was her own ; and the very respect 
and regard which she received from Hegai, must have strengthened 


r 


88 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


her, to continue the same course of meek submission and trusting 
hope. 

Her unambitious spirit and modest gentleness, we infer-from 
her asking nothing but what the chamberlain appointed. Yet 
11 the king loved Esther above all the women, and she found 
grace and favor in his sight and “ he set the royal crown upon 
her head, and made her queen instead of Yashti. Then the king 
made a great feast unto all his princes, and his servants, even 
Esther’s feast; and he made a release to the provinces, and gave 
gifts , according to the state of the king.” 

This was in the seventh year of Ahasuerus, and it was in the 
seventh of Artaxerxes that Ezra obtained permission to go up 
from Babylon to Jerusalem, with a new decree, authorizing the 
return of all the Jews who wished it, and granting greater 
privileges to them, and more lavish gifts, than any king had yet 
bestowed. 

Now, if this Artaxerxes of Ezra be the Ahasuerus of Esther, 
this event tallies exactly with the “ release to the provinces, and 
the gifts made according to the state of the king,” of which we 
have just read. Esther’s parentage and faith w r ere, indeed, not 
yet disclosed ; therefore this favor to Ezra was not so much 
owing to her influence, as to the gracious mood and munificent 
rejoicings, with which the king greeted her accession as his 
queen. 

The very words of Ezra, “ Blessed be the Lord God of our 
Fathers, which hath put such a thing as this into the king’s 
heart, to beautify the house of the Lord which is in Jerusalem ; 
and hath extended mercy unto me, before the king and his 
counsellors, and before all the king’s mighty princes 1” imply 
that his request was made, and permission accorded, during 
some great public rejoicing, and in presence of all the king’s 
counsellors and mighty princes. And thus, it is in exact 
agreement with the feasts and rejoicing which Ahasuerus gave 
unto all his princes and servants, when Esther was acknowledged 
queen.* 

* We read in Ezra, that it was in the first month Ezra commenced 
his journey, and the fifth when he arrived in Jerusalem, “ which was in 
the seventh year of the king and in Esther, that it was the tenth 
month when Ahasuerus first made her queen, in the seventh year of his 
teign, but tills does not prove that Ezra’s return to Jerusalem took place 


PERIOD V. ESTHER. 89 

It was during the rejoicings attending the choice of Esther as 
queen, that it appears most probable that Mordecai obtained 
that situation in the royal household, which is implied by bis 
sitting at the king’s gate. What office it was, does not appear. 
But he evidently had not occupied it before ; preferring to 
remain in dignified retirement, as enabling him more strictly to 
attend to the ordinances and requirements of his faith. Affec- 
tion and anxiety for Esther, was without doubt the real 
incentive to this change in his life. We have already read of 
his walking every day before the court of the women’s house to 
know how she did, and what would become of her ; and his 

before the events of Esther. We will endeavor to make our meaning 
more distinct : — Queen Victoria, we all know, ascended the throne of 
England in 1837, on the 20th of June, which is, counting by the solar 
months, the sixth month ; on the 20th June, 1843, therefore, she entered 
the seventh year of her reign. In the tenth month, which is October, 
1843, we read, an insurrection took place at Barcelona. In the first 
month, coeval with January, 1844, the Spanish Cortes was dissolved ; 
and in the fifth month, which was May , 1844, another revolution at 
Barcelona. Now, all these events took place in the seventh year of 
Queen Victoria’s reign ; but the events of the first and of the fifth months, 
occured after that of the tenth : and in exactly the same manner, 
Esther’s accession as queen, and Ezra’s migration, might both have taken 
place in the seventh year of Artaxerxes, and yet the event of the tenth 
month occur before that of the first and fifth. Tebeth was the tenth 
month ; in the festive rejoicings which followed, lasting several weeks, 
as was the custom of royal amusements, and in presence of the princer 
and counsellors, Ezra made his request, encouraged by the release given 
to all the provinces. In Nisan, which is the first month, his preparations 
being completed, and the Jews wishing to depart collected together, he 
set off on hi3 journey, and in the filth month, which is Air, he arrived in 
Judea ; and still it might be all in the seventh year of Artaxerxes, 
granting which is most probable, that that monarch ascended the throne 
ei.her in the sixth, seventh, or eighth month. This is of course differing 
with the Jewish calendar, which makes seventeen years elapse between 
Esther’s being made queen and the departure of Ezra ; but then, who is 
the Ahasuerus of Esther 1 And who is the Artaxerxes of Ezra ? They 
cannot be the same persons. Josephus, again, makes Xerxes the 
Artaxerxes under whom Ezra and Nehemiah go to Jerusalem, and 
asserts that this migration took place before Esther: this appears not 
only historically but scripturally incorrect. But to reconcile all the 
differing opinions is impossible ; we must leave it, as we have said 
z>eforc, to our readers to judge for themselves, only stating that the 
opinion we have advanced is founded on a careful research of both 
scriptural and ancient history, an examination of all the opposing points, 
tnd the adoption of that which appears most reconcilable with th« 
earrations of both Profane History and the Word of God. 


90 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

seeking an office in the king’s household, evidently proceded 
from the same affectionate cause. 

There is a dignity about Mordecai, in the simple fact of his 
concealing his relationship with the petted and all-powerful 
queen of Ahasuerus — in his pursuing, undisturbedly, the calm 
and meditative tenor of a good man’s way, which we cannot fail 
both to reverence and admire. It was enough for him that he 
was one of the chosen children of God ; what higher dignity 
could he have ? 

“Esther had not yet showed her kindred, ncr her people, as 
Mordecai had charged her : for Esther did the commandment 
of Mordecai , like as when she was brought up with him." 
How eloquently illustrative of her sweet and gentle character ! 
She was of that tender age, when the mind and temper are 
more liable to take the impression of things and characters 
around them, than to remember and act upon the education 
and impressions of earlier years. She had been two or three 
years completely separated from personal intercourse with her 
adopted father. She had received nothing but indulgence ; 
was translated from a lowly and retired home to be the sole 
possessor of a monarch’s love, and the sharer of a mighty king- 
dom — surrounded by luxury and adulation: and yet, so 
unchanged was her gentle mind and loving heart, that, in her 
high estate, she did “ the commandment of Mordecai, as she had 
done in her childhood and her youth.” The faith of her fathers 
was the safeguard ; for strangers and heathens were around her : 
the pleasures proffered were all tinctured with earth and time 
In the spiritual, the deathless part of her nature, the youthful 
Esther was alone. How perseveringly and religiously must 
Mordecai have trained her infant years, that even in this utter 
loneliness, she could yet have steadfastly trodden the one strait 
path, and never wavered in her duty, either to her guardian or 
her God. 

So some few years passed on, the exact number we cannot 
ascertain from the widely differing chronologists. During that 
interval, a conspiracy had been formed against the king by two 
of his chamberlains, which becoming known to Mordecai, lie 
imparted it to Esther, and by her it was “certified to the king 
in Mordecai’s name.” Inquisition was made into the matter, 
ana. the facts being discovered, the plotters were hangod, and 
the account written in the chronicles of the Persian king^ 


PERIOD y. ESTHER. 


91 


The instrumentality of Mordecai appears, however, to have been 
entirely forgotten, though doubtless Esther’s influence increased. 
Had he come forward himself with his important discovery, he 
would, no doubt, have at once received the honors afterwards 
bestowed ; but he heeded them not, and the whole affair sank 
into oblivion with regard to man, but not so in the Divine 
economy of God. 


CHAPTER II. 

ESTHER (CONTINUED). 

“ After these things,” we are told in Scripture, which is a 
term always signifying some lapse of time, the exaltation of 
Haman took place. Raised, through the favor of the king, 
above all the princes that were with him, the royal household 
vied with each other in doing him reverence, such being the com- 
mand of the king ; but “ Mordecai bowed not, nor did him 
reverence.” He who neither seeks nor cares for ambitious 
advancement and earthly honors himself, acknowledges them 
not in others. Haman, also, was an Agagite or Amalekite, 
one of the idolatrous nations whose iniquities were such as to 
demand the signal punishment of the Eternal — an enemy from 
the first to His people : and, therefore, the very lace of Haman 
would have been sufficient for Mordecai to refrain from noticing 
him. But even had he been of different lineage, the law of the 
Hebrews strictly prohibited all unseemly veneration to mere 
mortal man, as unbefitting those whose adoration was to be paid 
to God alone. We do not, therefore, at all agree with Milman’s 
supposition, that it was merely because they were rivals in earthly 
ambition, that Mordecai refused to do reverence to Haman. We 
have already seen that Mordecai had had opportunities enough 
already to aggrandize himself, but had neglected them all ; and, 
In fact, the word of God itself favors the inference, that hi» reason 
for refusing to do Haman homage, simply was, because “he 


92 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


(Mordeeai) was a Jew.” The servants of the king spake daily 
to him, demanding, “ Why transgressest thou the king’s com- 
mandment ?” and seeing that he “ hearkened not to them, they 
told Haman, to see whether Mordecai’s matters would stand, for 
he had told them that he was a Jew” This was a bold and 
tW’ess statement, exactly in accordance with the character of 
Vloraecai as already displayed. He had made no show of Iris 
religion, when there was no necessity so to do ; but his freely 
avowing it as his reason for refusing undue reverence to a 
man, and an Amalekite, ought to convince us that his desiring 
Esther to conceal her race and faith proceeded from no unworthy 
or cowardly motive — however we may fail to discover a satisfac- 
tory reason why he should have done so. 

Haman, full of wrath that any one should dare hold him in 
contempt- — a wrath no doubt increased, when he heard that the 
bold man who did so was a Jew — one of a despised and captive 
people, determined on a signal revenge. That some connexion 
existed between Mordeeai and Esther, was, no doubt, secretly 
suspected by him : to attack Mordeeai alone, would therefore 
avail him little, as he would be protected by the queen. The 
destruction of the whole Jewish people, if he could but procure 
the king’s consent, might involve Esther (of whose influence he 
was very probably jealous) as well as the hated Mordeeai ; and 
the mandate once gone forth, according to the laws of the Medes 
and Persians, was, he knew, unalterable. 

That nothing might fail him, he cast lots, according to the 
superstition of his age and country, to discern what month would 
be mc?t favorable for his project. The lot, guided by a merci- 
ful Providence, who was permitting the temporary ascendency of 
evil only to bring forth permanent good, fell on Adar, the last month 
in the year. It was then Nisan, the first month, and therefore 
twelve months intervened ; an interval doubtlessly hailed by 
Haman as allowing the entire destruction of the Jews, even of 
those situated in the remotest province of the empire; but 
which was in fact their salvation. 

With consummate caution Haman proceeded. Working upon 
the usual jealousy of the royal prerogative, he alluded to a certain 
people, who, dispersed amongst all the king’s provinces, followed 
a worship and law$ of their own ; that it was not to the king’s 
profit Alley should do so ; insinuating, no doubt, that they were 
likely, from their disloyal practices, to turn others also from then 


PERIOD V. ESTHER 


95 


allegiance and their gods : it would be wise, therefore, to have 
them destroyed — and, that the king’s coffers should not suffer, 
the w T ily minister concluded his counsel, by a promise of paying 
ten thousand talents of silver into the royal treasuries. 

The instant accordance of Ahasuerus with this cruel counsel, 
by giving into Haman’s hand his royal signet to do with the 
people as seemed good to him, certainly more resembles the 
character of the capricious Xerxes than the mild and benevolent 
Artaxerxes Longimanus; but then, in the brief record of Scrip- 
ture, we can hardly know all the subtle counsels of a minister 
already high in his master’s favor. The noblest and best 
inonarchs have at one period or another been liable to be led by 
evil ministers.* 

Whoever the monarch, thus much is certain, the horrible 
decree went forth over the vast domains of Ahasuerus, and con- 
sternation and mourning took possession of the hapless people, 
who, men, women, and little children, the old and the young, 
were condemned to be destroyed on the thirteenth day of the 
twelfth month, and all their possessions to become the spoil of 
their destroyers. Can we imagine a situation more appalling ? 
To know the fate impending — each day, each month to draw it 
nearer — and yet to have no power either to resist or fly ; to feel 
themselves hemmed in by destined murderers — men whom, 
perchance, they were in the habit of meeting in terms of kindly 
fellowship, turned into ruthless destroyers, simply from a 
monarch’s word ? Yet such was once the awful condition of the 
Hebrew people ; and it was the Eternal’s will, that by a woman's 
instrumentality they should be saved. 

“ When Mordecai perceived all that was done, he rent his 
clothes, and put on sackcloth with ashes, and went out into the 
midst ?f the city, and cried with aloud and bitter cry ; and came 
even before the king’s gate : for none might enter clothed in 
sackclolh. And in every province, whithersoever the king’s com- 
mandment and his decree came, there was great mourning among 
the Jews, fasting, and weeping, and wailing ; and many lay in 
sackcloth and ashes.” 

* We need but instance Isabella of Spain, who, one of the most noble, 
most magnanimous, aye, and most humane, alike as a sovereign and a 
woman, was yet persuaded into the expulsion of six hundred thousand of 
ner innocent subjects, as an act, not of policy, for that was against it, but 
of religion. 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 




Then was the time, had Mordecai been other than we assert 
he was, for him to have concealed his religion, not by his public 
mourning to proclaim that he, too, was one of the doomed. 
But such was not his conduct When all was peace amongst 
his people, he was content to remain in seclusion, to practise and 
to love his faith, without obtruding it by outward appearance 
of sanctity and holiness. Many of his brethren might, perhaps, 
in secret, have condemned him as lukewarm to the interest of 
his nation, or he would long before have made use of Esther's 
influence for their peculiar benefit. They might, and probably 
did, accuse him of scarcely belonging to them ; but, in the hour 
of their affliction and danger, they learned differently. He was 
in very truth among, and of them ; and the eyes of all turned 
to him alone for help and guidance. 

Esther, meanwhile, had continued in the retirement of the 
king’s palace, still his best beloved wife ; yet retaining all the 
affection for her adopted father which had characterized her 
youth. That Mordecai was very closely connected with her 
must have been generally suspected, else we should not find her 
maids and her chamberlains coming hastily to inform her of his 
strange proceeding ; but so ignorant were they of its cause, as 
to excite in us the supposition that his religion, and that of 
Esther, were still not publicly known. They merely mentioned 
that Mordecai was clothed in sackcloth and ashes, as in deep 
affliction, but made no allusion to the decree. 

“Esther was exceedingly grieved; and she sent raiment 
to clothe Mordecai, and to take away his sackcloth from him : 
out he received it not.” Yet still he spoke not the cause of his 
grief; and Esther, unable to follow the dictates of her own 
heart, to go to him herself, sent Hatach again to him, with her 
ro^al command, to know what it was, and why it was ; thus 
blending the dignity of the queen with the affection of the child, 
and compelling his reply. 

Her silence at first might have proceeded from the momen- 
tary hesitation, as to whether or not he should involve Esther in 
the danger of her people. Her race and faith were still unknown ; 
why should he betray them at a time when their betraval threat- 
ened death ? The affection of a father might have struggled 
with the feelings of the patriot: but ere Hatach returned his 
decision was made ; and imparting the designs of Haman, and 
the decree which had thence proceeded, he sent a copy of the writ* 


I’ERIOD V. ESTHER. 


9A 


mg to Esther, charging her to go in unto the king, and suppli- 
cate him for her people. 

For her people — the fatal words were said, and her race 
revealed ; he could not withdraw them, and the decree from that 
moment equally extended unto her, as to the humblest of her 
brethren. How fearful must this intelligence have been to the 
young queen ; and yet more fearful, if possible, the alternative 
proposed. We see at once, that her feeling towards her hus- 
band was fear, not love ; by her shrinking from his presence, 
unless expressly called. The favor with which she had been 
regarded from the first, would, had she been a woman of a bold, 
a intriguing spirit, have given her such influence, as to obtain 
access to her husband whenever she willed it, regardless of all 
laws to the contrary: but even the impending and wide-spread- 
ing danger could not conquer Esther’s natural terror. It seemed 
easier to let the decree proceed, and share the fate of her 
people, than call down the monarch’s wrath by intrusion into 
his presence : and the very fear endears her to us, proving that 
it was no unnaturally endowed heroine, but a very woman o f 
whom we read. 

“ Again Esther spake unto Hatacb, and gave him command- 
ment unto Mordecai : All the king’s servants, and the people 
of the king’s provinces, do know, that whosoever, whether man 
Dr woman, shall come unto the king into the inner court, who is 
not called, there is one law of his to put him to death, except 
such to whom the king shall hold out his golden sceptre, that 
he may live : but I have not been called into the king’s 
presence these thirty days probably an unusual lapse of time, 
which, supposing a decrease of the royal favor, naturally 
increased Esther’s shrinking repugnance from the task pro- 
posed. 

But Mordecai’s plan was already fixed, and this answer was 
.nstantly returned : “ Think not to thyself that thou shalt 
escape in the king’s house, more than all the Jews. For if thou 
altogether hold thy peace at this time, then shall enlargement 
and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place; but thou 
and thy father’s house shall be destroyed : for who knoweth 
whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time aa 
this?” 

These last words give us the solution of Mordecai’s confidence, 
alike in the influence of Esther, and the eventual deliverance of 
16 ' 




THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


the Jews. His heart, ever faithful to his fathers’ God — ever 
watchful to trace the superintending Providence which guarded 
his people as the shepherd his flock, had solved, as by a flash of 
light, the mystery before surrounding him. He knew now 
why, in preference to every other maiden, his precious child had 
been called to that high estate which he had mourned, as 
uniting her with heathens, and dividing her seemingly for evei 
from her people and her faitn. The Eternal, in His wisdom 
and His mercy, had placed her there, that she might be the 
chosen instrument, in His hand, for the preservation of His 
people. Convinced of this, despondency and doubt passed from 
the heart of Mordecai. He felt almost with a prophet’s cer- . 
tainty, that deliverance would come for his people ; and, there- 
fore, in words that sounded almost stern, in their total disregard 
of woman’s feelings, he called upon her to perform the part for 
which she had been raised to the kingdom — to listen, not to the 
voice of fear, but to arise and speak, else would she herself be 
destroyed, aye, and her father’s house (which included Mordecai 
himself), and deliverance arise for her people from another 
place. , 

It is evident that his confidence extended not to her, though 
with meek submissiveness she made no further resistance to her 
guardian’s will.. There is a deep and mournful meaning, breath- 
ing through her gentle answer — a hopelessness, yet self-devotion, 
which must twine her round our hearts, as one peculiarly 
unfitted for the terrible ordeal. 

44 Go, gather together all the Jews that are present in Shushan, 
and fast ye for me, and neither eat nor drink three days, night 
or day : I also and my maidens will fast likewise ; and so will 1 
go in unto the king, which is not according to the law : and if 
I perish, I perish? 

No undertaking, of whatever nature it might be, was ever 
commenced by the Hebrew nation without earnest prayer and 
fasting — not by the act of fasting to obtain favor in the sight of 
the Merciful Being who has no pleasure in the affliction of His 
creatures ; but by abstinence from all corporeal enjoyments to 
give the spirit ascendency over the clay, and better enable us to 
attain that perfect commune with our God, which, in periods of 
supplication, we so much need. Though in the Book of Esther 
only fasting is named, yet evidently prayer is understood, for to 
the Hebrews the first was wholly useless without the second ; 


PERIOD V.— ESTHER. 


9*1 

and in the beautiful prayer written by the author of the remain- 
ing chapters of Esther in the Apocrypha, we read in what light 
her character was regarded. We will transcribe it entire, 
entreating our readers at the same time to remember, that we do 
not regard it as inspired, and therefore as the actual prayer 
used by Esther on the occasion, but simply as a proof of the 
feeling with which she was considered by the ancient writers ; 
and that they too supposed with us, that her queenly state was 
a matter far more of loathing and repugnance, than of pride and 

“ And she prayed unto the Lord God of Israel, saying, O my 
Lord, thou only art our King. Help me , desolate woman , which 
have no helper hut Thee. For my danger is in mine hand. 
From my youth up, I have heard in the tribe of my family, 
that Thou, O Lord, tookest Israel from among all people, and 
our fathers from all their predecessors, for a perpetual inherit- 
ance ; and Thou hast performed whatsoever Thou dost promise 
them. And now we have sinned against Thee ; therefore hast 
Thou given us into the hands of our enemies, because we wor- 
shipped their gods. O Lord, Thou art righteous. Nevertheless 
it satisfieth them not that we are in bitter captivity ; but they 
have stricken hands with their idols, that they will abolish the 
thing that Thou with Thy mouth hast ordained, and destro}^ 
Thine inheritance, and stop the mouth of them that praise Thee, 
and quench the glory of Thine house, and of Thine altar ; and 
open the mouths of the heathen to set forth the praises of the 
idols, and to magnify a fleshly king for ever. 0 Lord, give not 
Thy sceptre unto them that be nothing; and let them not 
laugh at our fate, but turn their device upon themselves ; and 
make him an example that hath begun this against us. 
Remember, O Lord, make Thyself known in time of our afflic- 
tion ; and give me boldness , O King of the nations , and Lord 
of all power. Give me eloquent speech in my mouth before the 
lion : turn his heart to hate him that fighteth against us, that 
there may be an end of him, and all that are like-minded with 
Aim. But deliver us with thine hand, and help me that am 
desolate , which have no other help hut Thee. Thou Jcnowest all 
things, 0 Lord ; Thou knowest that I hate the glory of the 
unrighteous , and abhor the bed of the uncircumcised and the 
heathen. Thou knowest my necessity ; for I abhor the sign of 
my high estate which is upon my head . in the days wherein I 


38 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


show myself that I abhor it, and that I wear it not when I am 
private by myself. And that thine handmaid hath not eaten at 
Raman's table ; and that I have not greatly esteemed the 
king’s feast, nor drunk the wine of drink-offerings. Neither had 
thine handmaid any joy since the day I was brought hither to 
the present , but in Thee , 0 Lord God of Abraham. O thou 
Mighty God above all, hear the voice of the forlorn , and deliver 
us out of the hands of the mischievous, and deliver me out of 
my fear? 

Well, indeed, must the writer of the above prayer have been 
acquainted with the female heart, and consequently with all the 
secret suffering which Esther’s exaltation occasioned her indi- 
vidually. No thought of her own influence — no recollection 
that the king loved her above all others, could give her 
confidence sufficient in herself. Taught from her youth up to 
recognise the God of Israel as the guardian of her fathers — as 
the only Being who could come forward in their help — to Him 
she looked alone — and she could look to Him with confidence ; 
for in the years she had been compelled to hide her parentage, 
she had sought Him as her only pleasure and only consolation. 
She had worn her crown because it was His will ; but it was 
but a weight and sadness ; for in her private hours it was ever 
laid aside — she felt now, in her hour of intense supplication, the 
full comfort of previous and intimate commune with her God, and 
her trembling heart was strengthened. 

Some natures could not have borne the delay of three days, 
in the full anticipation of a trial; they must have gone at once 
to the king, or failed in power to go at all. Yet such natures, 
in a mere casual view, would seem. far stronger and bolder than 
Esther’s; and therefore demand and obtain greater admiration. 
But it is the exquisitely feminine character of Esther that is to 
me her peculiar and touching charm ; — it is the still under- 
current of deep feeling, which betrays itself throughout her 
history, and which is so peculiarly woman’s — the power of 
uncomplaining endurance — the firm reliance on a higher and all- 
merciful power for individual happiness — the absence of all trust 
in her own gifts of beauty and eloquence, unless so blessed by 
Ilim as to soften the heart of the king towards her — the courage 
not natural, but acquired through prayer — the conquest of her 
own weak tremblings, and venture of her own life, for the welfare 
of her people — and this not the mere impulse of the moment, 


PERIOD V. ESTHER 


99 


but pondered on through three days incessant prayer : these are 
traits which surelv must rivet our interest and our love. 


CHAPTER III. 

ESTHER (CONTINUED). 

Clothed in unwonted gorgeousness, and radiant in her 
extraordinary beauty, but her heart, at that awful moment, 
scarcely able to realize the holy strength and trust which prayer 
had wrought, on the third day Esther stood in the dreaded 
presence of the king : and though uncalled, and therefore 
disobedient to the law of the Persian kings, God gave her grace 
in the monarch’s sight ; and, instead of displaying anger, he 
held forth his sceptre towards her, and she drew near and 
touched it in sign that she implored a boon. In the Apocrypha 
we are told that faintness overpowered her, a natural portraiture 
of feminine weakness, and depriving her at once of all those 
attributes of a heroine, which would divide her from our sympathy 
as a being differently endowed to ourselves. Prayer had given 
her strength, else had she not thus stood uncalled before 
Ahfjsuerus ; but the mind, strong as it may be, cannot always 
bear up its mortal shrine ; and by the description of the deadly 
terror, depriving Esther of sense and speech, given by our ancient 
fathers, we see at once the awful struggle she was enduring. 

Her beauty, her very terror, all strongly excited the king’s 
affection ; and, hastening towards her, he soothingly exclaimed, 
What wilt thou, Queen Esther, and what is thy request ? Ir 
?liall be even given thee, to the half of the kingdom.” 

How blessedly must these words have fallen on Esther’s still 
quivering heart ! Yet, not at that moment dared she utter her 
request, fearful lest its boldness and extent should change the 
royal mood. She, therefore, merely besought him, “if it seem 
good unto the king, let the king and Haman come this day 


too 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


unto the banquet that I have prepared for him.” Ihe invitation 
was accordingly transmitted to Haman, and he and the king 
went in unto the banquet which Esther had prepared. 

It was a strange proceeding : this commencement— inviting 
the deadly enemy of her people to her private banquet — 
aggrandizing him as it were still more — rendering her own task 
more fraught with danger — and filling the minds of her 
countrymen with doubts as to the purity of her intentions 
towards them. It has ever seemed to me that Esther’s conduct, 
with regard to the two invitations, before her boon was spoken, 
proceeded not from previous design, but rather from impulse, 
which she followed as supposing it the inward direction of the 
Eternal ; but which, when accepted, startled even herself. But 
to retract was impossible ; and the daughter of Israel, radiant 
in her loveliness, entertained the king and his prime minister at 
her private table. 

Again did the king reiterate his inquiry and his promise* 
“ What is thy petition ? and it shall be granted thee : and what 
is thy request ? even to the half of my kingdom it shall be 
performed.” And again did Esther fail in the necessary courage 
to give it words ; and, instead of her weighty boon, we find her 
simply saying, “ If I have found favor in the sight of the king, 
and if it please the king to grant my petition, and perform my 
request, let the king and Haman come to the banquet that I shall 
prepare for them, and I will do to-morrow as the king hath said.” 

Her concluding words betrayed that she had yet another 
boon ; and her trembling spirit was probably reassured by 
the graciousness with which the invitation was accepted. 
Haman, too, left her presence rejoicing and triumphant. 
Little could the wily plotter dream that the God of her people 
was with Esther, inspiring the words of her mouth ; ana 
that this very exaltaticn was the forerunner of his fall. But 
yet, in the very midst of his triumph, as he left the palace, 
Mordecai, who still sate at the king’s gate in his sackcloth, 
stood not up, nor moved for him ; and Haman’s indignant 
wrath caused the exclamation, that riches, prosperity, gratified 
ambition, regal favors, all availed him nothing, so long as 
he saw Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king’s gate. To 
disperse these gloomy thoughts, he entered eagerly into 
the counsel of his wife and friends; and a gallows was 
erected fifty cubits high, while his blackened mind revolved 


PERIOD V. ESTHER. 


101 


some tale, tlie which to bring the king on the morrow, that his 
consent might be obtained for the instant execution of the man 
he abhorred. 

But that same night others also were wakeful. Surely 
we may picture the young queen wrapt in earnest and 
fervid prayer, still for strength and grace for the pursuance 
of her entreaty : w as she not a weak and trembling woman, 
whose only strength was prayer ? Thousands were destined tc 
the destroyer ; if she held back, who would arise and save ? and 
in that nightly vigil, when fear and doubt are so often magnified 
and darkened, what could she rest on but her God ? 

Nor was she the only wakeful one in the royal palace. Even 
as she prayed, the Eternal answered ; and His guiding mercy 
was at that very moment so ordering events as to prepare 
the way for her successful petition. Unable to sleep, Ahasu- 
erus, towards morning, commanded the chronicles of the 
kingdom to be read before him; and it so happened that 
the roll opened on the conspiracy against himself, which Morde- 
cai had discovered. Imparted to the king as it had been 
by Esther, the names and minute particulars had passed 
innoticed, more especially as Mordecai had always so shrunk 
from public notice. But, read now from the records ot 
the kingdom, the king’s attention was irresistibly fixed ; and he 
demanded “ What honor and dignity hath been done to Horde- 
cai fo.: this ?” — “ Then said the king’s servants that ministered 
unto him, There is nothing done for him.” The king, self- 
reproached at the neglect, and determined not to expose 
himself to forgetfulness again, inquired, “Who is in the 
court ?” And on being told that Haman stood without, com- 
manded his instant admittance. “What shall be done?” 
he asked, when the minister appeared, “ unto the man whom 
the king delighteth to honor ?” And puffed up by his inordi- 
nate pride and vanity, Haman thought in his heart, “ Who can 
the king delight to honor more than myself?” and advised 
a triumph, which would make him second only to the king. 
But when, elated with his own description, and convinced 
he was advising his own triumph, these words came — “I)o 
even so to Mordecai the Jew, w 7 ho sitteth at the king’s gate : let 
nothing fail of all that thou hast spoken;” — how can we 
attempt to describe the fierce rage of vindictive passions which 
must have taken possession of Haman’s heart ? How attempt 


102 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


to portray the black emotions with which the baffled plotter 
must have walked beside the splendidly caparisoned charger, on 
which, robed in the king’s apparel, sat his detested rival ? And 
no comfort waited him, when, mourning and enraged, he 
sought his home. “If Mordecai be of the seed of the Jews,” 
they told him, “ before wbom thou hast begun to fall, thou 
shalt not prevail against him, but shalt surely fall before 
him,” words which prove how forcibly the estimation in which 
the Jews, as the chosen and beloved people of God, were held 
by the nations around them, even by those who called them cap- 
tives. 

But little time had Hainan to ponder on further schemes of 
vengeance. “ While they were yet talking with him, came the 
king’s chamberlains, and hasted to bring Haman to the banquet 
which Esther had prepared.” Again had the queen assembled 
around her all of gorgeousness and festivity to gratify the luxu- 
rious taste of the Persian king. Her beauty, heightened by 
successful adornment, concealing under the graceful courtesy of 
the hostess the tremblings of the petitioner — fear probably 
becoming more and more intense with every passing moment — 
longing, yet fearing for the king to speak those words which 
must impel reply. And at length they came, coupled as before 
with the royal promise of fulfilment for whatever she might ask ; 
and she, who had fainted from very terror when first in presence 
of the king — who had felt so powerless to speak from the very 
magnitude of her boon, now boldly and firmly answered : — 

“ If I have found favor in thy sight, O king, and if it please 
the king, let my life be given me at my petition, and my people 
at my request: for we are sold, I and my people, to be 
destroyed, to be slain, and to perish. But if we had been sold 
tor bondmen and bondwomen, I had held my tongue, although 
the enemy could not countervail the king’s damage.” Few 
manifestations of self-devotion are more touching and complete 
than these simple words of Esther. We have seen and known 
the extent of her human fears — she might have worded her 
petition as in no point to include herself, but she scorned it— 
ehe might have been divided from her people in periods of 
prosperity and peace, because such was the will of Mordecai ; 
but not w T hen danger and death threatened. Their fate should 
be her own ; and fearlessly she included herself with them. 
Whether or not Ahasuerus at once associated this people for 


PERIOD V. EbTHER. 10ft 

whom Esther implored, with those destined for death by the 
machinations of his minister, we cannot determine ; but by his 
instant question — “Who is he, and where is he, that durst 
presume in his heart to do so?” we are induced to suppose that 
he did not, but imagined it simply some plot against the life 
and immediate kindred of his queen — a supposition likely 
enough to excite the fierce wrath, which, when his long-favored 
minister, Hainan, was accused as the adversary and enemy, 
caused him to leave the banquet in much disorder, and pace 
the palace garden, endeavoring so to pacify his anger, as calmly 
to decide. Haman, meanwhile, had fallen in deadly terror and 
agonized supplication on the couch, where, in accordance with 
Persian fashion, Esther had reclined during the banquet — a 
posture of apparent familiarity, rousing the monarch to yet 
greater fury ; and guided by his gestures even more than his 
words, the guards present seized Haman, and covered his face, 
an Eastern custom existing still, and signifying that the criminal 
is condemned to instant death. Harbonah, the chamberlain, at 
the same moment came forward with the information of the 
gallows prepared in Ilaman’s house for Mordecai, who had acted 
so faithfully towards the king; and Ahasuerus, still more 
incensed, commanded him to hang Hainan thereon. The royal 
command was instantly obeyed, and then only “was the king’s 
wrath pacified.” 

This summary mode of proceeding may seem strange to 
modern notions and civilized customs ; but it is in exact accord- 
ance with the despotic government of the East, not only in a 
time so long past, but even now, when the bowstring is the 
instant executor of punishment. Trial, and witnesses for and 
against ; the minute examination into facts, and the deliberate 
sentence of judgment, are all utterly unknown to this day in the 
East ; and, therefore, the instant chastisement of Haman in no 
way marks the sovereign as the capricious tyrant, which, identi- 
fying him with Xerxes, some historians represent him. Egre- 
giously deceived as he had been so long in his prime minister ; 
who had dared, as he supposed, to compass the life of his dearly 
beloved queen and her kindred, and who had secretly and vin- 
dictively prepared a gallows for the death of one who had saved 
the king’s life — all these circumstances were quite sufficient to 
rouse an Eastern temper into such fury, as could only be calmed 
by the death of the offender. Nor did the monarch stop here. 


104 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


He gave unto Esther the whole house (probably the rich posses 
sions) of Hainan ; and then it was that the queen revealed hei 
near relationship to Mordecai, and her faith ; and Mordeea? 
came before the king, and received from his hand the ring, oi 
signet, which Ahasuerus had taken from Haman, as a symbol 
that he was now prime minister in his enemy’s place. “ And 
Esther set Mordecai over the house of Haman.” 

liut personal safety and aggrandizement were not the inten- 
tion of the noble Mordecai and his courageous child. Falling 
prostrate at the feet of her husband, Esther besought him with 
many tears to put away the mischief of Haman the Agagite, 
and his evil schemes against the Jews — imploring, “ If it pleas« 
the king, and if I have found favor in his sight, and the thing 
seem right before the king, and I be pleasing in his eyes, let Jt 
be written to reverse the letters devised by Haman the Agagite, 
which he wrote to destroy the Jews which are in all the king’s 
provinces : for how can I endure to see the evil that shall come 
unto my people ? and how can I endure to see the destruction 
of my kindred ?” 

She could not have framed ner petition in words more likely 
to reach the heart of the sovereign, than by • making the cause 
of the Jews so completely her own. A mere entreaty for them 
as a people unjustly sentenced to destruction, would not have 
been thus successful ; but she identified them with herself. 
In their low estate — in their impending danger, she appealed 
for them as her people, her immediate kindred, that life would 
be joyless were they destroyed ; and her eloquent appeal was 
granted, for her beauty, her gentleness, her very deference and 
respect, had rendered her all-powerful with the king. Full 
permission was given to her and Mordecai to write as it pleased 
them ; “ for the writing which is written in the king’s name, 
and sealed with the king’s seal, might no man reverse.” Scribes 
were accordingly summoned in all haste — scribes who could 
write in every language of the hundred and twenty-seven pro- 
vinces, to the lieutenants, and the deputies, and the rulers; 
“ Wherein the king granted ilie Jews which were in every city 
to gather themselves together, and to stand for their life, to 
destroy, to slay, and to cause to perish, all the power of the 
people and province that would assault them , little ones and 
women, and to take the spoil of them for prey and copies of 
these writings were forwarded by riders on mules, camels, and 


r E R I 0 D V . ESTHER. 


105 


young dromedaries, being hastened and pressed on by the 
king’s commandment. 

Vindictive as, in a mere superficial view, this decree may 
appear, it was imperative, for the Jews could be saved by no 
other means ; the writing that was once written in the king’s 
name, and sealed with the king’s ring, could never be reversed 
— the laws of the Medes and Persians, once passed, were 
unalterable, however unjust or tyrannical they might be. 
Ahasuerus had commanded the entire destruction of the Jews ; 
he could not annul that edict, and, consequently, was impelled 
to grant Esther’s entreaty, by issuing another, desiring the Jews 
to defend themselves, even by the death of those who, in com- 
pliance with the previous decree, should assault them. A mode 
of proceeding very repugnant to present notions, but which can 
only be judged by the customs and laws of the past. 

We find in Josephus another reason for this destruction of 
Ahasuerus’s subjects. Alluding to some words in his letter to 
the governor, Josephus says in a note, “ These words give an 
intimation, as if Artaxerxes suspected a deeper design in Haman 
than had openly appeared — that, knowing that the Jews would 
be faithful to him, and that he could never transfer the crown 
to his own family, who were of the posterity of Agag, the old 
king of the Amalekites, while they were alive, and spread over 
all the Persian dominions, he endeavored to destroy them. Nor 
is it to me improbable, that those of the Jews’ enemies who 
were soon destroyed by the Jews, by permission of the king, 
were Amalekites, their old and hereditary enemies (Exod. xvii. 
14, 15); and that thereby was fulfilled Balaam’s prophecy, 
‘ Amalek was the first of the nations, but his latter end shall be, 
that he perish for ever’ (Numb. xxiv. 20).” * 

If this be well founded, it is a most agreeable solution to 
what appears, on a superficial reading, such indiscriminate 
slaughter on the part of the Jews. It was the fulfilment of 
Divine prophecy on a race whose exceeding wickedness had for 
so many centuries marked them out as objects of the Eternal’s 
wrath ; and His people were but instruments in His hands, 
instead of the fire or plague, with which, had it pleased Him, 
their destruction would equally have been brought about. But 
to return to Esther. 

* Josephus, Book xi chap. vi. note to p. 229 of second volume. 


108 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


With what joy must she have beheld the termination of ai 
her fears and inward struggles in the salvation and glory of hei 
people ! Her beloved guardian, Mordecai, was now acknow- 
ledged and honored by prince and people, as his many years 
of unpresuming worth deserved. “ He went out from the pre- 
sence of the king in royal apparel of blue and white, with a 
great crown of gold, and with a garment of fine linen and 
purple : and the city of Shushan rejoiced and was glad. The 
Jews had light, and gladness, and joy, and honor. And in 
every province, and in every city, wheresoever the king’s com- 
mandment and his decree came, the Jews had joy and gladness, 
a feast and a good day. And many of the people of the land 
became Jews ; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them.” 

And this, under the God of her people, was a woman’s work 
— wrought not by beauty, or power, or any of those arts which 
but too often guide the female favorites of monarchs, but solely 
by the strength of prayer. We have seen the tremblings of 
her gentle woman heart — that she had entered on the plan, 
with the conviction that she was risking her own life — that her 
own death for intruding upon the sovereign’s presence was 
far more likely than the preservation of her people, else where- 
fore the w r ords, “ And if I perish, I perish.” All this we have 
seen ; and can we hesitate a moment in the belief, that strength, 
eloquence, all she needed, were infused by the Hearer and 
the Answerer of prayer — that they were not of herself? How 
had she commenced this terrible undertaking ? By three days 
and nights passed in fasting and prayer, the long period proving 
in itself the extent of her shrinking fears, the magnitude of the 
task in which, simply in obedience to Mordecai, she had engaged ; 
and when we remember how her work commenced, can we not 
rest satisfied as to the how it concluded ? The sacred historian 
passes on to more eventful matters, to more public and national 
concerns; but we, lineal descendants of this fair and noble 
Jewess, shall not we accompany her to the same retirement, 
where she had lasted and prayed, and behold her again pros- 
trate, not now in agonized supplication, but in glorified, rejoicing 
adoration! — tracing the hand of her God in all — hearing the 
answer to her fervent prayer in the shouts of joy and triumph 
which rose from the city without — in the honorable exaltation of 
Mordecai — in the pure delicious feeling that she was no longer 
lonely in her high estate ; the Guardian of her infancy, second 


PERIOD V. ESTHER. 


107 


only to the king himself, would ever be beside her. Her faith 
known, and still herself beloved ! Oh ! that in itself must have 
removed a mountain of lead from her bounding heart. Hun- 
dreds, aye, thousands of her people were saved in one brief day 
from death ; and she had done this, her words — hers — weak, 
trembling woman as she was! How might she bear the weight 
of joy — the magnitude of the success ! heavy to humanity as 
was the magnitude of the terror and the boon ; no heart, mould- 
ed as was hers, could have contained it, save in prostration 
before Him whose sole work it was. The burden of joy, as the 
burden of grief, must find vent before our Goo — must pour back 
its gushing tide into the living fountain whence it sprang, or it 
will crush the heart which holds it ; and can we doubt that these 
were Esther’s feelings, because we find them not in written 
words ? Oh ! let every right-feeling woman look within her own 
heart, and place herself in Esther’s position, from the very 
beginning of her dreaded task to the completion, and then say 
how could such joy be borne, save as we have pictured it, in 
adoration of the Lord ? 

We have only one more public mention of Esther in the book 
bearing her name (except her writing to confirm the second letter 
of Purim), and that mention, according to the opinions of some, 
destroys the beauty of her character, and makes her appear in 
a vindictive and unfeminine light. We, ourselves, once shrank 
from the verse, and wished it had not had existence ; but a more 
matured consideration removes the objection, and completely 
exonerates Esther from the bloodthirsty vengeance with which 
she has by some historians been charged. Even Milmar., usually 
so just and moderate, speaks of the barbarous execution of the 
ten sons of Hainan as proceeding from her request, when in fact 
they were already slain. Verses 12, 13, of the ninth chapter 
of Esther, ar; those to which we allude. 

In the Jewish law, the gallows was not used as it is now. 
The criminal was always executed first, either by stoning or 
strangling, and only the dead body suspended upon it as a fur- 
ther mark of guilt and ignominy ; and also to deter others from 
following the sinful example. Esther’s request that Haman’s ten 
sons might be hanged on the gallows, had nothing whatever to do 
with a vindictive desire of vengeance upon them for their father’s 
sin. They had been already slain amongst the enemies of the 
iews in Sushan ; slain most probably in their own assault, for 


108 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


the Jews were not to attack , bat merely to defend. “ They 
gathered together, we are told, to lay hand on those that sought 
their hurt.” And the governors and rulers, lieutenants and 
deputies of the king, all helped the Jews. Consequently those 
who assaulted them were their determined and hereditary foes, 
resolved, from the great hatred they bore them, to act on the 
king’s first edict, even if the second should cost them their 
live j. Amongst these, of course, were Hainan’s sons, who, 
Amalekites and Agagites like their father, were the Jews’ most 
deadly foes ; and the foremost in assault, falling in strife, and 
stricken by the God whom their iniquities had profaned, 
through the swords of His people. The 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th 
verses of this same chapter (the ninth), specify them by name, 
amongst the slain, which is confirmed by the words of Ahasuerus 
himself in the 12th verse, “The Jews have destroyed five hun- 
dred men in Shushan the palace, and the ten sons of Hamanf 
etc. And that Esther should have made her request, that her 
people should do on the morrow as they had done the preced- 
ing da} 7 " — and that Haman’s ten sons should be hanged upon 
the gallows, proceeded from no unfeminine or vindictive feeling ; 
but simply from the "wish that the future safety of the Hebrews 
should be fully secured. As an individual, and judging by her 
previous truly feminine character, Esther would, without doubt, 
have shrunk from the awful retribution which the plot against 
the Jews had wrought. But she was denied the privilege of 
thus judging and thus acting: on her depended the present 
nonor and future security of a people, liable to be trodden under 
foot at every capricious change in the mood of their captors ; not 
alone in her own time, but years after. Guided most probably 
by the counsels of Mordecai, Esther was compelled to resort to 
those measures, which were likely to deter their enemies from 
future attacks. The ignominious exposure of the dead bodies 
on the gallows — sons of the onetime mighty and all-powerful, 
all-ambitious Haman — would bring more forcibly than aught 
else to the minds of men, the palpable evidence, that the Most 
High God still watched over His people, and turned every evil 
thought against them to the evil and the ruin of their connivers. 
And the request of the second day’s defence is but a proof 
that the deadly haters of the Jews were not yet subdued, 
but were likely to spring up again more inveterate than before. 
Esther’s words are, “ Let it be granted to the Jews to do 


PERIOD V. ESTHER. 


109 


to-morrow according unto this day's decree ; and that decree was 
to defend , not to revenge — to protect themselves against the 
assaults which by the previous edict would be made ; not tc 
R lay and cause to perish, and take the spoil, as had been deter- 
mined against them. Esther, therefore, issued no order of blood 
and vengeance, of which she is sometimes accused, nor were 
the Jews guided by any feeling but that of self-defence ; else we 
should not read, more than once repeated, that even in the homes 
of their deadliest foes, and with the royal decree to appropriate 
all to themselves — “ On the spoil laid they not their hand." 
Not in Shushan alone, but in every province and every city 
where they gathered together and stood for their lives — where 
the richest and most tempting spoils must have offered them- 
selves to their very grasp — still “on the prey laid they not their 
hand." 

Was this a war of revenge, of national aggrandizemei t ? 
What could have prevented, had they so desired, the entire 
subjection of the whole Persian kingdom ? What people, save 
the people of God, in those dark times, would have been satisfied 
merely to stand on their own defence, goaded, as they must 
have been, by the entire destruction and inveterate enmity 
working against themselves? But the wars of the Jews were 
never, from the first of their selection as the Eternal’s chosen, 
actuated by either ambition or revenge. 

A reference to our first volume (Chap. III. of the Third Period) 
will give the causes and intention of their first wars, the 
reduction of the Holy Land, not for personal aggrandizement, 
but in direct obedience to the direct command of the Eternal. 
In looiing further on, through all the different phases of Jewish 
history, we find no mention of wars undertaken for aggrandize- 
ment or private revenge. Their wars were always defensive ; 
and, though richly gifted with all the noble and heroic qualities 
necessary to warriors and heroes, they were nationally a peaceful 
and pastoral people, satisfied with the lands assigned them, and 
with becoming wealthy through the direct blessing of their God. 
We never read, as is so often the case in the histories of 
contemporary nations, of acts of private revenge, or public 
dispute settled by the sword. No personal appropriations of 
acquired spoil — no inroads from one tribe to another, as, even 
in modern times, is so often the case with nations who are 
divided into clans oi bodies. Whatever wars are read of, aa 


no 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


undertaken by the Hebrews, are either by the direel command 
of their heavenly King, or in their own defence. 

Glancing, then, back on the Bible history regarded in this 
light, from the selection of Abraham to the time of Esther, we 
cannot find one incident or trait to justify the idea, that the 
slaughter of Ahasuerus’s subjects proceeded from any revengeful 
or vindictive motive, but was simply in self-defence. We cannot 
draw any inference contrary to the supposition, that it was the 
Eternal Himself who ordained and permitted this destruction, 
not alone because of their designs against His people, but 
because they were the descendants of a most sinful race, and 
inheritors and promulgators of iniquities and abominations which 
the God of Truth and Love abhorred, and for which he had, 
from the very first, sentenced them to chastisement and wrath. 

Looking upon it in this light, all over-refined notions nust 
pass away. It is idle, in such an incident as this, to condemn 
our noble Ancestress as vindictive and revengeful, because her 
request shocks our individually sensitive notions. We must 
take a wide grasp of the whole character and bearing, not of 
Esther alone, nor of the Jews in Persia alone ; but of the general 
character of the nation in the past, and how their present 
danger was likely to affect them in the future. We must 
recollect that they were still captives — still liable to persecution 
and intolerance — to be attacked and slaughtered, at the very 
first caprice of the despotic monarchs under whom they 
lived. 

Even as Ahasuerus had been persuaded by the specious 
reasoning of a favorite minister, so might be other monarchs. It 
was therefore the special care of Mordecai and Esther to adopt 
every means for th q future security of their people, not alone for 
their present safety ; and in that barbarous age, and still more 
barbarous people, no measures were so likely to be efficient, as 
the public degradation of Hainan’s family, and the noble stand 
made by the Hebrews against their idolatrous oppressors. The 
Jews had probably been considered a poor-spirited, unnerved 
people, likely to bend beneath oppression, and to be easily 
subdued. Their spirited defence, however, taught their adversa- 
ries a very different lesson ; not only that the God of Israel was 
with them still, but that they possessed within themselves all the 
attributes of an heroic nation, who would never fail in the 
fceseition and protection of their rights; and who, were tha 


PERIOD V. ESTHER 


111 


necessary liberty of action allowed them, would never tamelv 
submit to the insults and oppression which they had endured. 

In reading and reflecting over this history, Jet us never 
forget the important truth so often repeated, that “ on the spoil 
the Jews laid not their hand,” because this one brief sentence is 
sufficient to convince us, that no revengeful or rapacious feelings 
actuated our ancestors. In the edict issued against themselves , 
not only their lives were to be destroyed without any regard to 
age, infancy, or sex, but their possessions were to have been 
confiscated to the king’s treasury — they were to be spoiled as 
well as slain ; and they might have retaliated. All which had 
been decreed against them, they were at perfect liberty to have 
turned upon their foes ; but they scorned it. The same spirit 
which caused Abraham to refuse the gifts of Melchizedek, lest 
he should say, “ I have made Abraham rich,” actuated them to 
touch not one item of the vast stores, which, from the awful amount 
of slaughter, might have been their own. Accused as we have 
so often been of love of gold above all other love — of seeking, 
by honorable or dishonorable means, to increase our worldly 
stores — of grasping and rapacious dispositions — let us point to 
this simple line, “ On the spoil laid they not their hand ;” and 
the charge is at once proved false ! Let us look back on this — 
on a hundred other similar traits in our history — and our 
national character will stand forward as free from such igno- 
minious stain as any other nation in the world. What, if our 
modern history seem to contradict this, and the sneerer and the 
scoffer point to the usurers of the middle ages, and, dilating on 
their wealth, their rapacity (so called), their grasping minds and 
hardened hearts in s:eh opprobrious colors portray the Jew? 
What, if the) do this ? They prove nothing — nothing to tarnish 
the national character of the Hebrew, as proved in the 
momentous records of the past, and confirmed by their giving 
up all of wealth and greatness, rather than their religion, in 
their expulsion from Spain, — but much, much against themselves, 
in the fearful effects of persecution and intolerance, which they 
have hurled upon the people of the Lord. 

The Book of Esther concludes with the establishment of tho 
festival of Purim, which, observed as it is by every class and 
every denomination of the Jews throughout the world to the 
present day, is in itself a convincing evidence of the perfect truth 
of the whole history. The 14th and 15 th days of Adar were 


112 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


ordained to be “ remembered and kept throughout every gene 
ration, every family, every province, and every city ; that thes* 
days of Purim should not fail from among the Jews, nor the 
memorial of them perish from their seed. Then Esther the 
queen, the daughter of Abihail, and Mordecai the Jew, wrote 
with all authority, to confirm this second letter of Purim.” And 
from that time it has been observed by every man, woman, or 
child, bearing the honored name of Jew. Its ordinance and 
confirmation is the last mention which we have of Esther by 
name ; and, therefore, her after influence with respect to the 
favor shown her people can only be conjecture- Yet if the 
Ahasuerus of Esther be indeed Artaxerxes Longimanus, the 
Artaxerxes of Ezra and Nehemiah, surely we may be justified in 
the theory (which we acknowledge to be a favorite one), that 
the ready granting of Nehemiah’s petition, and the subsequent 
favorable edicts issued for Jerusalem and the Jews, originated in 
the love borne by Artaxerxes for his lovely Jewish queen. We 
are told that Mordecai the Jew was next unto King Ahasuerus, 
and great amongst the Jews, and accepted by the multitude of 
his brethren, seeking the wealth of his people, and speaking 
peace to all his seed.” lie no longer refused a situation of 
dignity and trust, because it was bestowed upon him as a Jew. 
He had no need either to deny or conceal the religion of his 
forefathers. He had been chosen to succeed Haman in dignity 
and favor with the king, because he was of Esther’s kindred and 
Esther’s faith ; and, his duty marked out for him, as his pious 
mind must have felt, by God Himself, it would have been but 
mock modesty to have shrunk from the high estate and honors 
with which its performance was associated. 

The lofty beauty and retiring dignity of his previous charac- 
ter are not yet, in the smallest degree, infringed by his 
acceptance of the office proffered. The welfare of his people was 
ever the uppermost in his thoughts ; and if he could serve them 
better in public than in private life, he would not shrink from 
the notoriety attendant on his doing so. We read, “ that he 
was accepted by the multitude of his brethren,” meaning that 
they regarded him with the same deep love and reverence which 
they had felt towards him in his low estate. No envy, none of 
those bitter feelings so often excited towards greatness, could 
actuate them towards him ; for he sought “ but the prosperity 
of his people, the peace of all his seed.” 


PERIOD V. ESTHER. 


1 ! 3 

If Mordecai retained so much influence, years aftei the events 
which had occasioned his accession to greatness had faded into 
the past, it is not likely that Esther retained less. Her public 
and private positions must both have been very much happier 
then before. Her influence over the heart of her lordly husband 
lnd been acknowledged, by a concession, which, in a Persian 
Emperor, was as unprecedented as it was extraordinary. That 
it either created or heightened love towards him, we cannot 
doibt, for it is not in woman’s nature to receive such manifesta- 
tions of kindness and forbearance, without giving some warmth 
in return. Besides, he knew her faith, her race, and yet he 
co dinned, nay increased, his favor towards her : thus proving 
forgiveness of her previous silence on that important point. The 
beloved guardian of her youth was ever near her, second in 
rank to the king himself; her people honored and protected; 
and many who had before been heathens, embracing the cove- 
nant of the Lord, and swelling the Hebrew ranks ; and all this, 
under the blessing of the Eternal, had been achieved by her 
conquest over herself, and her influence with the king. Was it 
likelv, with such memories, that Esther would sink into a mere 
nonentity in the Persian Court ? That she would not, even as 
Mordecai, use all her influence for that holy .people to whom her 
whole heart still clung ? And when we think attentively over 
all this, her character, her eventful history, her power over her 
husband, may we not, in some degree, be justified in the suppo- 
sition, that the Artaxerxes who permitted the departure of his 
favorite Jewish cup-bearer, Nehemiah, and gave him letters to 
the keepers of the king’s forests, and to the governors, &c., in 
furtherance of the rebuilding of Jerusalem, and to insure the 
safety of the Jews in Judea, was the same monarch, who, under 
the name of Ahasuerus, had already so favored them in Persia? 

The very fact of Nehemiah, a Jew, being the chosen cup- 
bearer to the king, and evidently in such high favor that the 
sadness of his countenance attracted even his royal master’s 
notice ; the remarkable coincidence that the king’s court was 
Btill in Shushan the Palace, the very scene of Esther's request, 
and the favorite residence of Ahasuerus, when every other notice 
of the kings of Persia placed them in Babylon ; the particulars 
mentioned, by Nehemiah, of the queen being by the king's side , 
when the petition was made ; all confirms the above supposition, 
and gives rather a solid foundation to the conjecture of Esther’s 


114 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


influence forwarding the suit of Nehemiah, which we have with 
all humility advanced. 

The character of Esther, as an individual and a female, pos- 
sesses many traits to call for admiration and love. She was not, 
indeed, a heroine ; nor do we perceive in her that peculiar 
energy and promptness under danger and trial which we have 
noticed in the characters of Abigail and the Shunammite ; but 
the very want of this quality is consoling, proving, as it does, 
that the most timid, the most essentially feminine, may be per- 
mitted to accomplish great ends, and become instruments in the 
Eternal’s hand for the welfare of His people. Energy of purpose 
and of action, though essentially woman’s attribute, is yet a por- 
tion only for the few. There are more to resemble Esther than 
Abigail ; and to those that are timid and fearful, and shrinking 
from an imperative duty, or some imposed task, — who would 
rather remain in sad quiescence than make one effort to conquer 
an imagined destiny — to them — we would point the consoling 
moral of Esther’s history, and beseech them, like her, to arm 
themselves with the arrows of fervent prayer, in the very face of 
inward tremblings and a failing frame, and to go forth and do, 
and leave in kinder hands the rest. 

Esther’s quiescence and obedience to her destiny was neces- 
sity. Chosen as the bride of a heathen monarch, desired by 
Mordecai not to show her people or her kindred, debarred from 
all her friends, and pleasures of her earlier and happier years, it 
was her duty to submit patiently and calmly ; and her gentle 
and enduring character enabled her to do so less sufferingly 
than more energetic minds. But we see that to endure was less 
painful to her than to act, by her repugnance to go forward wh<m 
the call of d sty came. Her spirit, instead of being roused by 
the extreme emergency of the case, shrank back appalled : and 
to brave the king’s anger, by venturing uncalled into his pre- 
sence, seemed far more terrible than the danger threatening 
thousands. To share their fate appeared easier far than to court 
it ; and even when, in obedience to Mordecai, she promised to 
seek the king, it is very evident that her anticipation was failure 
— and death. Had Abigail or Deborah been in her place, 
their different characters would scarcely have required even the 
direction of Mordecai ; their own energy would have urged 
them forward, an 1 supported them by the inward promise of 
success. 


PERIOD V. ESTHER. 


115 


But that Esther did not naturally possess this strength and 
firmness, renders her conduct yet more worthy of our "grateful 
admiration. We see her displayed before us, in her woman’s 
weakness, as, indeed, one of ourselves. We behold her in not 
one point, except in her surpassing loveliness, our superior; 
nay, to bring her closer to us still, she is a captive in a strange 
land, even as we are now ; and yet was she, this weak trem- 
bling girl, the savior, the benefactor of thousands; and her 
name has come down through thousand ages, wreathed with 
the admiring love of that very people whose ancestors she 
saved. 

To do as she did, to be exposed to the same awful ordeal — 
of a monarch’s wrath, or a people’s preservation — is, indeed, not 
ours ; and we should be grateful that it is not ; but how often 
will the annals of private life demand as mighty a conquest of 
self in woman ! How often are we called upon to subdue, or, at 
least, entirely to disregard natural weakness and disinclination, 
and go forward, when we feel so wholly incapacitated from the 
task proposed, that we would more gladly sit down, and let the 
waves of care and sorrow roll over us, than make one effort to 
stem the rushing torrent, and make evident the supremacy of 
mind over circumstance, of the will over events ! There are 
trials and exertions in private life demanding such courage and 
firmness to meet, that we often feel as if the frame must sink 
under them ; but still, like Esther, let us go forward, feeling it 
may be with her, “ if I perish, I perish,” rather than draw back 
from the path of duty. Life and death are not with us, but 
with the Lord ; and, in llis hands, how often does anticipated 
death become rejoicing life ; and the thunder-clouds, which we 
feared to meet, dissolve, when boldly fronted, into sunshine and 
bliss. Suffer, indeed, we may and must. Even the approval 
of conscience — the conviction that what we do is undoubtedly 
right, and a blessing will spring from it — will not shield us 
either from inward trembling or mental pain. Physical weak- 
ness itself will cloud and blacken our mental vision. The blood 
disturbed by unusual exertion will flow unequally ; sometimes so 
sluggish^, that further efforts appear impossible, and mind and 
heart both feel stagnant ; sometimes so wildly and hotly, that 
the whole frame feels one mass of nerve and irritation and ill- 
temper, even towards those we most love, impossible to be 
avoided. The very comfort, even the power of Prayer, is gone 


116 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


from us. But, in such times (for they must come), let ua 
only remember that we are suffering physically, and nerve our 
minds to bear them ; even as we would some bodily pain, or 
sickness, the source of which is so much more easy to be traced. 
Let us not shrink back, because we feel as if we were doing 
nothing ; as if our former fears told us right, and we are 
too weak, in constitution and in mind, to be anything but a bur- 
den, and had, therefore, better sit down, and endure , instead of 
rising up to act . 

Had Esther, when, overcome with natural terror, she fainted 
in the presence of Ahasuerus, given up her purpose, because she 
felt so utterly incapacitated, both mentally and physically, from 
pursuing it — her people would have perished, and she heiself 
have been either swallowed up in the universal destruction, or 
sunk into a mere soulless, spiritless nonentity ; her whole life 
embittered by the consciousness of what she might have done , 
and what she did not do. But we have seen that she did 
not draw back, though the stoppage of every pulse, from pure 
terror, evinces the struggle with natural feeling, — which it 
was. 

We do not find her deploring her constitutional timidity and 
wishing she possessed the energy of others. No ; the fount of 
living waters, whence Esther derived the strength and determi- 
nation which she so much needed, to go forward, is open to us 
all. It was incessant and most fervent prayer. The God of 
compassion and love, who hearkened unto her, is still our God 
— and will grant us the same strength and firmness for our indi- 
vidual duties which He vouchsafed to her. Let us not suppose, 
for a single instant, that only in great emergencies He hears 
us. Esther prayed to Him, and conjured others to pray for her 
to Him, in this danger, only because she had known the efficacy 
of prayer in little things. “ Neither had thine handmaid any 
joy since the day that I was brought hither, to this present, save 
in thee, 0 Lord God of Israel !” She had been accustomed 
from her youth upwards to look on Him, and pray to. Him, as 
the Saviour and Father of her people and of herself; and, 
therefore, she knew and felt that now, in this great danger, and 
most repugnantly-accepted task, prayer only could be her 
strength. 

And, without this infused strength, oh, what is woman ! — a 
reed, liable to be turned by every passing wind, or crushed 


PERIOD V. ESTHER. 


117 


Defore the slightest storm ; to bend to the soiling earth, and, 
clogged with the particles of dust and taint, which, in its 
Drostration, will cling to and deaden it, find it a weary, if not a 
hopeless task, to lift up its drooping head towards the pure 
heavens again. 

But let us not imagine, because mentally and physically we 
are weaker than others of our sex ; because we have, no energy, 
no firmness, no self-support (if we may be allowed the term), 
that we are to pass uselessly and wearily and despondinglv 
through life — that the Bible gives no sympathy :r encourage- 
ment to such as we — and, therefore, that nothing is expected 
from us ! Nothing can be, when we are so different., so much 
weaker than our fellows. Alas ! alas ! for those who hug them- 
selves in such comfortable belief; and when the day of reckon- 
ing comes, behold what they might have done — behold it, and 
in the agony of remorse, yearn to do it, and yearn in vain! 
How know we, but our punishment after death may be to look 
on all which in life we have neglected ; to awaken, as by a 
flash from Heaven, to its awful consequences ; and to know no 
rest, no sleep, in the wild yearning to perform it, and to feel we 
have no more the necessary power — and this through weary, 
weary time, which in Heaven has no measure, in eternity no end ! 
It is an awful thought ; one it would be well to ponder on ere 
it be too late. 

That the Bible does give both sympathy and encouragement, 
even to the most constitutionally weak, is proved by the sweet, 
gentle, feminine character of Esther. Strength of herself, 
indeed, she had none ; but it was asked, and granted ; and so it 
will be unto all. 

To the women of every faith, race, and land, then, her history 
is alike instructive and inexpressibty consoling; but it is in the 
hearts of her descendants, the women of Israel, she should be 
most closely shrined. By us, the festival of Purim should be 
hailed as something more than a mere rejoicing season, or even 
as the anniversary of a great redemption. Every woman should 
take it to her own heart, and remember, with holy joy and 
thankfulness, that the preservation of her people, which that day 
recalls, was, under the Eternal, the work of a woman not stronger, 
not more gifted than herself. God might equally have worked 
by other means ; but that He did choose so weak and frail an 
instrument, is right, indeed, to be a source alike of consolation 


18 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


and rejoicing unto us ; and strengthen each and all of us in 
the hope that we, too, may become instruments in His hands 
for good. 

It was not that Esther was a free agent, or had powers more 
extended than our own. Though the wife of a mighty monarch, 
she was captive ; and so too are we. 

We, too, may individually be thrown into positions begirt 
with sadness, where the rites and ceremonies of our faith must 
be adhered to in the secresy of our own hearths and hearts. 
Yet may we still be ready at the first call to identify ourselves 
with those who suffer for our faith — still be enabled to serve the 
good and holy cause. And those unshackled by peculiar posi- 
tions, following so publicly and unquestioned the religion of 
Moses, that they are likely to forget they are the Lord’s 
captives, because man makes them his equal* — to whom life is 
such a quiet routine of uninterrupted employment, that the 
idea of individuals serving our nation is regarded as a tissue of 
folly and romance : yet even these can serve the cause of the 
Jews. We can, each and all, determine to honor our religion 
ourselves, and so make it honored. We can infuse such seeds 
into the hearts of our sons, that Judaism may never want 
defenders, or such representatives as will raise it, even in its 
captive state, in the respect and consideration of the nations 
Yes ! though through the infinite mercy of the Eternal, such 
intercession as Esther’s is no longer needed, still let us emu- 
late Esther in the elevation and the acknowledgment of out 
holy faith — in our individual adherence to its spirit and form 
through every difficulty and through every woe. Let every 
returning festival of Purim find us as women, and in our own 
retired spheres, still loving, still knowing, still working for our 
holy religion, and determined, through social and domestic con- 
duct, to make its glory, and its comfort, and its beauty, evident 
to all. We shall not see the fruit of this still and silent work- 
ing ; but we shall feel its efficacy in the calm and tranquil glad 
ness of our hearts and homes 


PERIOD V. EZRA AND NEHEUIAH. 


119 


CHAPTER IV. 

BE VIEW OF THE EVENTS NARRATED BV 
EZRA AND NEHEMIAH. 

Before we conclude this Fifth Period of our subject, we 
must take a brief review of the condition of our ancestors con- 
- temporary with the captives of Babylon ; but who, under Ezra 
and Nehemiah, had returned to Jerusalem. The first captivity 
caused a complete revolution in the history of the Jews. Their 
very characteristics as a people, and as individuals, appeared to 
have undergone a change. 

Adversity and captivity retained the Hebrews in that faith , 
and those forms, which in their prosperity they had neglected 
and despised. Men arose from their ranks, gifted with such 
power as to lead the multitude as with a silken thread — to sever 
even the strongest and most endearing ties, because such was 
the word of the Lord, such the law He had ordained. Mar- 
riages with the heathen were not alone again forbidden, but 
actually dissolved. The Sabbath-day, cleansed from the profane 
employments of buying and selling which had before desecrated 
it, commanded to be kept holy ; an ordinance established amongst 
the priests, “ to charge themselves yearly with a half shekel for the 
service of the house of God, for the shew-bread, and the continual 
meat-offering, and the burnt-offering of the sabbaths and the new 
moons, for the set feasts, and for the holy things, and for the sin- 
offerings, to make atonement for Israel, and for all the work of 
the house of our God a covenant, entered into under “ a curse 
and an oath, to walk in God’s law, which was given by Moses, 
the servant of God ; and to observe and to do all the com- 
mandments of the Lord our God, and His judgments and His 
Uatutes.” 

Nor was this solemn covenant entered into by the males of 
Israel alone. Their wives and their daughters are distinctly and 
emphatically named (see Nehemiah x. 28), as amongst those 
who had voluntarily separated themselves from the people of 
17 


120 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


the land unto the law of their God, “ every one having knowledge 
and understanding.” And in chap, viii., which so impressively 
and affectingly describes the reading of the law by Ezra, 
in the presence of the whole congregation of Israel, the women 
are also expressly mentioned. “ And Ezra the priest brought 
the law before the congregation both of men and women , and 
all tnat could hear with understanding,” etc. “ And he read 
therein before the street that was before the water gate from the 
morning until midday, before the men and women , and those 
that could understand ; and the ears of all the people were 
attentive unto the words of the law.” 

The scene must indeed have been of mournful interest. The 
lemple was still unbuilt ; the city, by far the greater part, in 
ruins. On a pulpit of wood, with the sad memorials of J udah’s 
departed glory all around him, stood Ezra, probably now an 
aged man ; for it was some years since he had left Babylon. 
On his right and left hand were thronged his brother Levites, 
who, voluntarily consecrated to the service of their God, lent a 
dignity and solemnity to the proceedings, reminding the populace 
of those days when they officiated in the Temple, and the glory 
of the Lord was visibly revealed. Below them, far as the eye 
could reach, the people had gathered themselves as one man, 
ardent and earnest to hear once more the words of the Most 
High God. Men and women indiscriminately blended, for the 
law appealed to both , and not then had the blighting words 
been whispered, that woman has no power to seek and know 
the Lord — that the study and comprehension of the law are for 
man, not her. We see her hastening, even as man, to lister: to 
the words of her God — to accept with the whole fervor of her 
ardent heart, His covenant ; and she is welcomed, not rebuked. 

“ And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people 
(for he w r as above them) ; and when he opened it, all the people 
stood up ; and Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God. And all 
the people answered, Amen, Amen, with lifting up their hands ; 
and they bowed their heads, and worshipped the Lord with their 
races to the ground.” And then “ the Levites caused the people 
to understand the law ; and they read in the book of the law 
of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused the people to 
understand the reading.” And when the people would have 
wept — for their own and their ancestors’ sinful departure from 
‘lie commands of the Lord stood before them more vivid! v 


PERIOD V. EZRA AND NEHEMIAII. 121 


more appalling, as they thus listened to the law — Nehemiali and 
Ezra forbade it, for they said, “ The day was holy unto the Lord 
their God ; mourn not, nor weep ; but go your way, eat the fat, 
and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom 
nothing is prepared : for this day is holy unto our Lord : neither 
be ye sorry ; for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” 

Solomon, rejoicing in consequence, followed this public reading 
of the law. The Feast of Tabernacles was proclaimed throughout 
all the cities of Judea, and observed with such solemnity and 
gladness as had not been since the days of Joshua the son of 
Nun, and in exact accordance with the written law of Moses, 
keeping the feast seven days, and on the eighth day a solemn 
assembly. A general fast, confession of sins, repentance, and 
prayer, with reading the law, and worshipping the Lord their 
God, soon after followed, the Levites rehearsing the many tokens 
of the Eternal's goodness, from the selection of Abraham unto 
the present time, and the awful wickedness of the people. Then 
followed the acceptance and sealing of the covenant by the men 
of Israel, their wives , sons, and daughters — the selection of the 
people — the rulers to dwell in Jerusalem — and of the rest of the 
people, one in ten to be chosen by lot to dwell in Jerusalem, 
and the other nine to dwell in other cities, and thus re-people 
the still beautiful, but mournfully desolate land. In the twelfth 
chapter, we find the selection of priests and officers for the 
service of the Temple, and the solemn dedication of the wall, 
“ with gladness, and with thanksgiving, and with singing, with 
cymbals, psalteries, and harps. Also on that day they offered 
great sacrifices, and rejoiced : for God had made them rejoice 
with great joy : tbs wives and children rejoiced, so that the 
joy of Jerusalem was heard even afar off.” Officers for the 
treasuries, offerings, firstfruits, tithes, singers, and porters, all 
were appointed, exactly in accordance with the law of Moses, 
and “ the commandment of David, and of Solomon his son.” 

The mixed multitude was also separated from the children 
of Israel. Even Tobiah, the Ammonite, closely allied to Eliashib 
the priest, who had weakly allowed him, although an Ammonite, 
a chamber in the Temple, was cast forth with all his household 
stulf. No distinction of persons was made. All who had 
married strange wives, were they united even to the priest and 
highest officers, were, 'f they refused to separate from their 
unlawful connexions, scouted from the congregation of the Lord 


122 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


And thus, after a weary interval, faithfulness to the religion of 
Moses, and, in consequence, external and internal peace, seemed 
once more about to be the portion of Judea. 

But let it not be imagined that this was either easily or 
satisfactorily accomplished ; or that the noble exertions of Ezra 
and Nehemiah were productive of enjoyment, and, consequently, 
of earthly reward. So far from it, that if we read over the 
books of Ezra and Nehemiah attentively, we must be struck by 
the repeated mention of humiliation, fast, and prayer, with 
which their efforts were attended — the constant struggle, constant 
disappointment — the hope roused by a seeming response to 
their own ardent aspirations, and crushed again by revolt and 
disobedience. We find both Ezra and Nehemiah repeatedly 
taking on themselves the burden of their brethren’s guilt, and 
beseeching pardon, as if themselves were the offenders. The 
prayer of Ezra, in the ninth chapter of the book bearing his 
name, and that of Nehemiah in his first chapter, are the most 
exquisite illustrations of pure patriotism that can be found in 
any history, and should bid our hearts glow with love and 
veneration towards men who so toiled and suffered for their 
country and their God. Profane History can give us no nobler 
and purer patriots than Ezra and Nehemiah. They may tell 
of warlike deeds and glorious heroism ; but it is a nobler 
heroism, a more exalted valor, which can struggle on to free 
their countrymen from self-inflicted slavery — from those shackles 
of the spirit , which are far more difficult to remove than the 
shackles of a tyrant. Ezra and Nehemiah had to work not only 
against the enslaver, but also against the enslaved, for men’s 
evil passions and rebellious wills were the tyrants who held 
them chained, and these were to be subdued ere freedom could 
be achieved, and Judea liberated from the thraldom of her 
children’s sins. Modern patriots in general leap the full reward 
of their exciting enterprise in national prosperity and individual 
glory. The deaths of Ezra and Nehemiah are not specified; 
but their books reveal enough to convince us that they toiled unto 
the end — that personal aggrandizement, earthly distinctions, 
entered not their thoughts. They had indeed done much ; but 
their lives probably closed ere half their patriotic wishes were 
accomplished, or their ceaseless exertions crowned with visible 
success. 

And so it must be with all those whc embark heart and soul 


PERIOD V. EZRA AND NKHEMIAH. 123 

in tlie glorious service of a people’s good. There must be dark- 
ness and despondency but too often, even in the noble mind, 
which has cast behind it all thought of selfish enjoyment, who 
pines, seeks, aspires after but one glorious goal, the improve- 
ment, religious and intellectual, of his species. There must be 
sadness, there must be disappointment, for such minds look far 
beyond, into space and time, and hope to compass the advance- 
ment of an age in the brief period of one human life. They 
feel, they know what should be ; they thirst, they struggle after 
its attainment with a giant’s strength, forgetful that in the 
individual minds of the vast mass of their fellows, there may be 
but one little grain of the immortal, the intellectual, Which is so 
restlessly working in themselves ; and, therefore, that time only 
can behold the reception and acknowledgment of those import- 
ant Ends and Truths, which they so vividly behold. 

Those, then, who would serve their fellows, must be armed 
with patience, with perseverance, which will bid them work on, 
in the very face of disappointment, and an utter want of sym- 
pathy ; with hope that will carry them on her angel wings, above 
the ruggedness and toil of mere earthly labor ; with faith that 
will look into the future, to behold there the fruition of those 
seeds which they have perhaps even unconsciously sown. 

Would we, then, in truth, labor in the cause of God, by 
endeavoring to benefit our fellows, we must utterly annihilate 
the vain presumptuous dream that we shall behold our own 
work, anc 3 thus reap a reward which has never yet been found 
on earth. Why do we see so many turn their shoulders from 
the wheel at the very moment when they should persevere ? 
Why do we see the best and noblest exertions often checked 
in their first vigor, and never resumed ? Why do we hear so 
many, whose, words had once been so eloquent with hope of 
good, in a few brief years speak but of the prevalence of evil, 
the impossibility of achieving aught of lasting worth ? Why ? 
because they look to ‘present reward — they expect to see the 
matured fruit before even the seed could have taken root ; they 
provided not against disappointment ; they studied not the 
rugged nature of man ; they look not back into the past, and, 
comparing it with the present, mark what was and what is — 
and note the long years which intervened before improvements 
which we now feel so common, that they are no longer improve- 
ments, could be accepted and acknowledged. They forget that 


124 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


almost every national benefit conferred on man was in its first 
projection deemed a very madness, and more than one of its 
hapless originators persecuted unto death. Yet the seeds such 
supposed maniacs planted never withered ; they lay in often 
uncongenial soil, proving their existence, and passing from one 
mind into another, perchance only by a breath, which bore 
them unconscious of its burden, till in the proper time they 
burst into full blossom, were cherished, fostered, for men had 
advanced while that little seed lay in abeyance, and then 
ripened into fadeless fruit. 

Irrelevant as these remarks may appear to our subject, yet a 
little consideration will prove their application. 

In Judaism, as in everything else, the present is an age ;vf 
advancement — of improvement. The law, indeed, which God 
gave, remains pure, perfect, eternal as Himself, needing naught 
from man ; but it is in the observance of that law, its spiritual 
observance , in which we remark progression , and hail it with 
glowing thankfulness, as seed, which, when ripened into fruit, 
will lead us once more to our own Holy Land, and to the 
restored favor of our God. But we are no enthusiasts to 
believe this will be either in our own time, or in that of some 
generations down. We do not suppose, because there is a stir 
in our ranks, — an aspiration after holiness, — a struggle with 
deep-rooted prejudices, — a desire to become purer, more spirit- 
ual, more enlightened, — that we shall look upon the fruit of 
such holy seed, — Jhat twenty, fifty, aye, even a hundred years 
wi.l complete the full perfection of the glorious End for which 
we aspire now. No ! And we would conjure and beseech our 
brethren, in whose hearts lieth the ardent desire to accomplish 
national and individual good, to think with us — to despond not, 
if they behold nothing which would reveal that the holy seed 
has taken root, but much to make them tremble that it has 
faded into air. Let them but cease to hope to reap what they 
sow — let them but look far into Space and Time, and rest con- 
tent that their labors will then bring forth fruit — only let them 
nerve themselves to work, without the faintest dream of earthly 
recompense or visible success, and labor on. They “ will have 
cast their bread upon the waters, and they will find it after 
many days.” 

It is not, however, only in a generally national view that wa 
nave taken this rapid sketch of the books of Ezra and NehemiaU, 


PERIOD V. EZRA AND NEHEMIAH. 125 


They are particularly important to us as women of Israel, 
burdened as we are with the charge, that Judaism degrades and 
enslaves us. By the especial mention of wives and women in 
every ceremony and covenant with which Ezra and Nehemiah 
again organized the people, it is very evident that no written 
or even traditional law then existed to our disparagement. 
Neither had captivity, and a residence with a heathen people, 
altered the national equality of the sexes, which in every reli- 
gious ordinance the Jewish law commanded. This is a very 
important truth ; as the period of Ezra is many years removed 
from the direct interference of the Almighty with His people : 
and in such a time of confusion and departure from the pure 
law, had there been any traditional statute which could have 
allowed the degradation of the weaker sex, we should find it 
acting against them in full force. Had the women of Israel 
been unaccustomed to join in religious exercises, or to feel them- 
selves of no importance in the congregation of the Lord, it is not 
likely, that, after so long an interval of captivity, when the 
national ceremonies were compelled to be suspended, we shoula 
find them so eagerly flocking to listen to the reading of the law, 
bringing their children with them to join in the confession and 
humiliation for national sin, and to enter, heart and soul, into a 
covenant to walk in the law of Moses. They had no doubt seen 
enough, in their captivity, of the women of other countries, to 
feel more gratefully than ever, their own superiority in station, 
intellect, and responsibility. Eagerly and joyfully then they 
resumed obedience to that law, which guided and protected 
them with such mild and gentle guardianship, lifting up their 
hearts to a Father in heaven, who so watched over and tended 
them, and compelled man to assign them that station of equality 
and respectful tenderness, which, without such law, would, if we 
judge of the manners and customs of other and contemporary 
nations, have inevitably been refused them. 

With this important fact, then, we close our present Period, 
and with it the records of our female ancestors, which are found 
in the Bible. Our succeeding parts will contain notices of those 
exalted Hebrew females mentioned in Josephus — a brief review 
of Israel as she was after the erection of the second temple — 
and the effects of war, dispersion, and persecution, upon her now. 
We shall find, even there, enough to confirm us in the position 
we have advanced ; but even had we not — even if the records 


126 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


of more modern Judaism ^presented nothing but a dark and 
awful picture of social and individual degradation — even if laws 
were promulgated by erring man, depriving us of our long- 
granted privileges, and debasing us in the scale of creation much 
below our brother man — still it would prove nothing but the 
fearful effects of superstition and intolerance on the human mind. 
It could not do away with the law which God Himself had given. 
It dare not term itself divine, if it contradict one item of that 
which the Bible holds up before us, alike in the precepts given 
by the voice of God, and in the history of His female children ; 
and, therefore, as in not one precept, in not one mention of 
woman in the Word of God, can be discovered one evidence 
of her social or individual abasement, so must not only the 
Israelite, but his opponents be convinced, that the woman of 
Israel needs no other law, no other faith but her own, to convince 
her of her immortal destiny and her earthly duties — to guard 
the hallowed circle of her home — or raise her, as an individual, 
to perfect equality with man. 


SIXTH PERIOD 


CHAPTER I. 

IE VIEW CF THE JEWISH NATION, IROM THE 
RETURN FROM BABYLON, TO THE A I’ PEAL OF 
HYRCA.NUS AND ARISTOBULUS TO POMPEY. 

We are now to commence a period in the History of the 
Women of Israel, completely and even painfully distinct from 
any which has gone before it. Indeed, so complicated, so amal- 
gamated with the histories of other nations, so little purely 
national is Israel, and so few and far between are the notices of 
women, in the history of the nation, from the death of Nehe- 
miah to the dispersion, — that there is very, very little which we can 
claim our own, or from which we can glean the consolation and 
lessons for individual social guidance, which are presented in the 
word of God. So little is there, in fact, of woman, that we may 
be censured for dwelling so long on a period which has so little 
to do with a work entitled “ The Women of Israel,” as almost to 
contradict its name. Yet where there are so very few works 
relative to our history in the vernacular idiom, and still fewer in 
which the Hebrew himself comes forward, with an attempt to 
fill up the void in national literature, and give the youth of his 
nation some assistance, distinct from the peculiar tenets which 
must pervade the writings of the most liberal of other creeds ; 
we trust, that to linger a little while on our general history and 
thus explain away some of the errors and prejudices which have 
unconsciously gathered round us from unanswered accusations, 
may not be considered unnecessary, or even irrelevant to the 
subject on which we professed to treat. 

Where there is no allusion to the Women of Israel of the 
past, let it be remembered that we are writing for the Women 
of Israel of the present ; and, therefore, that we do not depart 
from the profession of our title. To the men of Israel — the 


128 


THE WOMEN OF ISRaBL. 


works of out own ancient writers, are, or ought to be, open ; and 
they, therefore, cannot need the feeble effort of a female pen : 
but woman does. She has neither the time nor privilege, nor, 
in fact, the capability of seeking and penetrating into the vast 
tomes of stupendous learning, the complicated and allegorical 
questions and replies, narratives and histories, contained in the 
works of our venerable teachers ; but is she on that account to 
remain entirely ignorant of the history of her people, in which, 
whether in prosperity or adversity, in patriotism or persecution, 
she has ever borne a distinguished part ? How is she ever to 
realize that spirit of nationality and holiness which should be so 
peculiarly her own, if she knows little of her national history, 
save from Gentile writers ? How know what is demanded of 
her now , if she does not sometimes ponder on the past , remem- 
bering, while she shudders at the awful sufferings of her peop.e, 
that what has been , may again be. And is she endowed with 
the same noble spirit which guided her hapless ancestors ? Has 
she the same deep love of her God, and His religion, which will 
keep her faithful in the midst of the horrors of persecution, or 
amidst the yet more dangerous ordeal of prosperity and peace ? 
How is she to know this, if she looks upon herself only as the 
child of the soil which has given her a home, and all its attend- 
ant blessings ? How is she to feel this, if she looks on the his- 
tory of her people as far too antiquated to concern her now, and 
lends but too ready an ear to the false tale, that ancient and 
modern Judaism are totally distinct. How is she to reject pre- 
judice, and to separate the true from the false, if all her information 
concerning the history of her people be derived from Gentile 
writers ? It is expecting far too much from human nature to believe 
that we can feel as Jews , only because we are bom such. More 
particularly women, who seeing so little different in the daily 
routine of their domestic lives from those around them, may bo 
liable entirely to overlook their nationality, and imagine that a 
formal adherence to peculiar forms and ceremonies is sufficient 
for them ; and, in consequence, know much less of their own 
history, teeming, as it does, with so much to interest and appal, 
Ilian that of the country in which they dwell. 

r Ihe scarcity of Jewish works by Jewish writers, is the real 
cause of this much regretted evil. We have histories without 
number, and suited to every age, and every taste, of othei 
countries * but where shall we find one of the Jews which w*i 


PERIOD VI — HISTORICAL REVIEW 


129 


can safely put int:> the hands of our children and youth ?* The 
»ove of England, of France, of America, is imbibed with their 
growth, because they know and delight in every event of these 
-heir adopted countries ; and they would feel the same towards 
their own land, could they learn as much concerning it. 

To provide for this want cannot be accomplished in a work 
like the present. The writer has only mentioned these things to 
explain, why, instead of concluding where the biographies of 
the “ Women of Israel” may appear to conclude, noticing only 
the few female characters which may be casually mentioned, 
from the erection of the Second Temple to the Dispersion, she 
prefers taking a rapid, but connected, survey of the history of 
her people during that period. Where notices of individuals 
are scarce, we must endeavor to defend our position from gene- 
ralities. Analogies may be drawn from the histories of states 
as well as from the biographies of individuals ; and, as we 
proceed, we shall find that much which may appear from a 
mere superficial glance irrelevant to the Women of Israel indi- 
vidually, will yet so bear upon them socially , that our assertion 
of their non- degradation, their equality and elevation in the 
Jewish law, and in Jewish history, will be strongly and unan- 
swerably confirmed. 

The return of the Jews from Babylon did not restore that 
nationality and exclusiveness which Ezra and Nehemiah hoped, 
and for which they labored. With the Babylonish captivity, had 
in truth ended the history of Judea as a distinct nation. The very 
division of the tribes appears to have been lost ; and instead of 
the patriarchal territories of Reuben, Simeon, Ephraim, &c., w r e 
only read of Samaria, Galilee, Perea, Idumea, and of Judea, as 
signifying a very trifling portion of what had once been comprised 
under that name. But two tribes returned from captivity, and 
for them the province termed Judea might have been sufficient; 
but how changed must they have felt was the aspect of their 
once beautiful land — how vainly have yearned to behold their 
brethren occupying the territories which had been assigned them 
by God himself; and thronging to His one Temple in the feasts 
lie had appointed ? Not only were strangers and aliens within 


« Milman’s is an exception. What we want, are those histories which 
wo can put into young persons’ hands ; so written that they are read 
or pleasure, not as tasks. 


130 


THE WOMEN OE ISRAEL. 


their land, but ten tribes were lost, and they themselves, though 
nominally free, in reality still under the yoke of the Persian kings. 
Nor was Palestine any longer the only residence of the children 
of God. Communities were forming in many parts of the 
world, particularly in the many territories of Persia and in 
Egypt ; and thus, though outwardly bound by the same 
religion, inwardly, interests could not fail to be divided, accord- 
ing to the position which they occupied in connexion with 
foreign courts. 

Of the constant rebellions against their Heavenly King, by 
the recurrence of idolatry, and those awfu. practices mentioned 
in the previous periods of their history, we no longer hear ; but 
in their place we find assimilation and intimate connexion with 
the manners and customs of other nations. In fact, so intimately 
blended with the histories of Persia, Macedon, Syria, Egypt, 
Parthia, and, finally, Rome, is the history of J udea from the 
Babylonish' captivity to the War, that it is scarcely possible to 
divide them, or find any national incidents of sufficient note as 
to enable us to dwell upon them as we have hitherto done. 
The Eternal had veiled His face from them. Even in their 
return, we find no evidence that He had restored them the light 
of His presence, and acknowledged them once more as a distinct 
and holy nation — governed by Himself. The very religion, there- 
fore, appears to have taken a different aspect — the High Priest 
was still nominally the head of the nation — the ceremonials of 
the law rigidly and perse veringly observed — but its beautiful 
spirit of love, which had entered into every household, blessing 
and guiding every domestic relation, appears to have been 
entirely lost, from the national assimilation with other countries. 
That there were still families in whom this blessed spirit existed, 
true and faithful to every spiritual as well as outward ordinance, 
cannot be doubted ; but in the darkness enveloping this part 
of our history, we can only trace the general departure of 
nationality, and prevalence of public evil, which so repeatedly 
exposed us :o misery and wrath. Before the Babylonish cap- 
tivity, even the periods of most awful iniquity were illumined 
by rays from God Himself, in the holy men who, inspired by 
Him, stood up to threaten and console. We were not left 
entirely to our own hearts — to sin, unrebuked; but on our 
return from Babylon, this might no longei be — we had indeed 
power to subdue sin and become holy , fitted once again tc 


PERIOD VI. THE MACCABEES. 


131 


occupy the promised land, and in the face of the whole earth 
stand forth the chosen people of the Lord ; but this conquest 
was to be achieved by individual and national efforts. The 
Eternal had instructed us in those things, the observance of 
which would regain His favor. He left us to pursue our own 
paths. 

During the wars of Alexander of Macedon, and the contests 
of his successors, Judea repeatedly changed masters — and wo 
therefore perceive how Tittle she can be considered as an inde- 
pendent state. So few claims had she to nationality, that we 
repeatedly read of the Hebrews joining voluntarily the ranks of 
their several masters — serving as faithful soldiers to the Greek 
or Egyptian, and, in consequence, imbibing interests and feelings 
totally distinct from the Hebrew warriors of the olden time. 
These soldiers seldom or never returned to their own land, but 
swelled the Jewish colonies of other states ; and, therefore, long 
before the general dispersion, we perceive the prophesy cf 
Moses already in partial fulfilment — proving at once the utter 
fallacy of the argument entertained by some Gentiles, that the 
return from the Babylonish captivity is the fulhlment of those 
glorious and consoling promises contained in all the Prophets — 
and comforting us by the conviction, that these things are yet 
to be. 

At length, however, the national spirit was aroused ; and for 
a brief interval independence was secured. The awful cruelties 
of Antiochus Epiphanes, the universal suffering of the whole 
Je\Tsh people, not only from bodily torment, but from the pro- 
hibition of their sacred law (which, of course, on the instant 
became more dear), the desecration of their holy Temple — evils 
so terribL could no longer be endured ; and under the heroic 
Maccabeean brothers, the Jews threw off the yoke of slavery. 
It was a noble epoch in our history, as full of chivalric daring, 
of the purest patriotism, of the most heroic perseverance, as can 
be found in the pages of any history, ancient or modern. They 
fought for no personal aggrandizement — for no increase of ter- 
ritory — no dominion over their fellows — but simply to purify 
their land from the abominations which had desecrated its holy 
Boii — to re-establish the religion of their God, and obtain the 
freedom of their persecuted brethren. 

And all this they did. The plan of our present work forbids 
oui lingering on ' this glorious epoch, and we are compelled to 


132 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


pass it by as briefly and unsatisfactorily as all our other historic 
notices ; but what Hebrew of either sex can read this period of 
Jewish history, even in the narration of Gentile writers, with* 
out such emotions stirring within him as instinctively betray his 
near connexion with the heroic spirits of whom he reads ! Have 
we not patriots and heroes, on whom to dwell with that glowing 
admiration, so thrilling and so beneficial to our aspiring youth \ 
— and shall we only associate our ideas of the Jewish nation 
with what she is. never casting a thought on what she was ? 

The independence wrought by the Asraonaeans, or Maccabees, 
permitted Judea, for a brief interval, to take her position in the 
world as a sovereignty governed by her own kings. The gra- 
titude of the people naturally led to the bestowal of the royal 
dignity on the family of their deliverers. Simon was the only one 
of the brothers remaining ; and, in a general assembly held at 
Jerusalem, the people made both the High Priesthood and the 
office of Regent, or Prince of the Jews, hereditary in his family. 

Aristobulus the First, the grandson of Simon, was the first 
who assumed the title of King, his father, John Hyrcanus, 
and his grandfather, Simon, having been satisfied with their dig- 
nity of High Priest, and being acknowledged by foreign poten- 
tates and their own people, as Princes of the Jews. The real 
dignity lasted but a very brief interval ; and those who possessed 
it, instead of strengthening and nationalizing their home domi- 
nions, endeavoring to restore that ancient and exclusive kingdom 
which had once characterized Judea, were continually making 
alliances with the Romans, and other states ; becoming, as 
it were, so blended with them, that it is difficult to regard 
Judea, even in her well-earned independence, as the holy and 
peculiar nation which she had been, and was, in fact, command- 
ed still to be. We find it difficult to recognise her as the samo 
nation which had before occupied the land. Her frequent 
missions to other countries, her alliances and foreign friendships, 
could not fail to decrease her nationality, by the constant efflux 
of Jews to distant lands, where it was scarcely possible for them 
to adhere to their religion, and the repeated and invited 
admission of strangers within Judea. We can no longer recog- 
nise the High Priest of Moses’ ordination, w 7 ho was to bear on 
his breast and brow the solemn symbol of his inauguration ; 
who was to minister in the holy of holies, till he seemed 
in the eyes of the people, to stand or. the very threshold of 


PERIOD VI. FOREIGN ALLIANCES. 133 

heaven, and receive direct communications from the Most High. 
We cannot recognise this peaceful and sacred minister in the 
high priesthood of any who, after the Babylonish captivity, 
bore that solemn name. The service of the Temple could have 
been but secondary in the multitudinous affairs, foreign and 
domestic, which crowded round the Prince or sovereign of 
Judea. In the law of Moses, the offices were not to be united ; 
because, in the first place, the tribe of Levi were devoted as the 
elected priests or servants of the Temple ; and from them, there- 
fore, no king could have been chosen. In the second, engaged, 
as a sovereign must be, in unavoidable wars, and other tem- 
poral concerns, Moses knew that it was impossible for him to 
devote himself to spiritual things, as the office of High Priest 
demanded; and in the third, no king, who, as the leader 
of armies, must have been a shedder of human blood, could ever 
have been sufficiently pure to have attended at the altar of the 
Most Holy. David was not even permitted to build a “ House 
for the Lord how much less, then, could he have officiated as 
High Priest 1 

In the later kings, one prevention to their obtaining that 
solemn office, was evaded. They were descended from the 
priestly line of Joiarib ; but that very circumstance proves how 
completely at an end was the division of land and service, 
which had formerly characterized Judea and her sons. We are 
told repeatedly, “ unto the tribe of Levi Moses gave not any 
inheritance; the Lord God was their inheritance, as he said 
unto them.” How then, if the division of the tribes had con- 
tinued in force, could the office of high priest and king have 
been united ? How could a king’s inheritance be the house of 
the Lord God alone, as it could and ought to be the priest’s ? 
We are particular on this point, because it is often asserted, 
and by some believed, that the temporary independence of 
J udea as a sovereignty fulfilled the prophecies ; whereas the very 
fact of th$ royal family descending from Levi, not from Judah , 
and the complete amalgamation of the tribes, so that their divi- 
sion was impossible, is a sufficient evidence in itself, that the 
prophecies contained most forcibly in Ezekiel xxxvii. from verse 
15 to the end, and in the whole of the forty-eighth chapter, were 
not in any one single point fulfilled by our return from Babylon ; 
and, therefore, must allude to a period centuries more distan* 
from the term of the Prophet’s life. 


184 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


Simon, John Hyrcanus, Aristobulus the First, and Alexander 
Jannaeus, resigned successively, uniting, as had been established 
by the people, the priesthood, with the royal purple. Alexandei 
Jannaeus left the crown to his wife Alexandra, and, in con- 
sequence, the high priesthood was severed from the crown, and 
given to Hyrcanus her eldest son. Had he succeeded hia 
mother, as was anticipated, the offices would have probably 
been quietly re-united. But the daring and aspiring spirit 
of his younger brother, Aristobulus, by causing internal dissen- 
sion, gave the first fatal blow to the tottering independence 
(so called) of Judea. On the death of Alexander, Hyrcanus 
was, indeed, nominated king, and the children of Aristobulus 
retained as hostages for their father’s conduct; but a single 
battle between the brothers decided the point. Hyrcanus con- 
sented to retire to private life ; and Aristobulus was acknow- 
ledged king. The high priesthood is not mentioned ; and from 
the continued enmity manifested towards Aristobulus by 
the Pharisees, who were mostly priests and teachers, it almost 
appears as if he could not have occupied that station. Even had 
he been publicly acknowledged high priest, the office must have 
been merely nominal ; for his constant foreign and civil wars 
would have allowed him but little time or inclination for atten- 
tion to an office demanding such individual purity and domestic 
peace. 

The independence of Judea (if indeed it can be so called), 
reckoning from the election of Simon, in 14 b.c. to the appeal 
of the brothers to Pompey, the great Roman general, in 63 b.c., 
had lasted eighty years — a period fraught with foreign war and 
civil dissension, cruelties and miseries ; resembling indeed 
the histories of the nations around them, but utterly incompati- 
ble with the pure law which had guided Judah before the cap- 
tivity. 

We read of Aristobulus the First shutting up his mother 
in prison, and starving her to death, because his father having 
left the crown to her, she naturally refused to relinquish her 
authority, and this man was termed a high priest of a people 
whose beautiful law had commanded that even disrespect 
to a mother should be punished with death ! We read of 
brothers arming against brothers, the most influential imprison- 
ing and even murdering the others — of Jews rising against 
Jews, or compelled to fight against each other, by joining oppos- 


PERIOD VI. HYRCANUS. 136 

ing armies, and adopting the interests of different states. We 
search in vain for that beautiful spirit which, had the law been 
obeyed, would have quieted and hallowed the people. We 
glance over these sickening horrors, and ask, are these records oi 
a people to whom God himself spake in thunder from Mount 
Sinai, and deigned to give a law which all had the power 
to obey, and which if obeyed, would have brought down 
the days of heaven upon earth ? Can we marvel as we read the 
appalling history of the Jews, from their return from Babylon to 
the last war, at the awful punishments and miseries which have 
been their portion in every quarter of the globe ? And yet, 
while other nations have passed away for ever, leaving not 
a trace, we still remain as witnesses of the awful effects of 
human sin ; and more thrilling still, of that changeless truth 
which had said we should be a people before Him for ever, 
and therefore we exist; — of that unfathomable mercy, which 
holds out promises of pardon, restoration, love, and therefore we 
may hope and pray, and cling to Him as our Rock of Refuge 
still. 

Of our domestic history as a people during these eighty 
years, we can glean little, except that at the very time the 
law was so appallingly disobeyed and disregarded — there had 
arisen men, stern and exclusive adherents of both written 
and traditional laws. At the very time that in some points all 
nationality appeared entirely lost, and Judea only sought 
for temporal dominions, which might be secured and widened 
by hostile wars or peaceful alliances with other potentates, 
a spirit of exclusiveness, of rigid observance of some portions of 
the law had, as in direct contradiction, chained one body of 
Jews. We are told that “ the law, which of old was perpetually 
violated, or almost forgotten, was now enforced by general con- 
sent, to its extreme point or even beyond it. Prone before 
on every occasion to adopt the idolatrous practices of their 
neighbors, they now secluded themselves from the rest of the 
world, in proud assurance of their own religious superiority — • 
their city, their native soil, their religion, became the objects of 
the most passionate attachment ; the observance of the Sabbath, 
and even of the sabbatical year, was enforced with rigor. 
In short, from this period (the return from captivity) commences 
that unsocial spirit — that hatred towards mankind — that want 


[36 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


of humanity to all but their own kindred, with which they have 
been branded by all the Roman writers.”* 

This, though an eloquent passage, scarcely appears to 
have sufficient foundation, as actuating the whole nation. 
How could the whole law be rigidly enforced when we see 
Aristobulus the First acting as we have noticed ? How could 
the laws, alluding to the extreme purity and sanctity of the 
high priest, have been obeyed, when that office was so often 
filled by a warrior ? How could they be said to keep them- 
selves secluded as a nation, when we see so many thousands 
fighting under the banner of foreign kings, and accepting offices 
and dignities at their hands? How could they demonstrate 
hatred to all mankind when foreign alliances were so often 
made ? And we shall find Herod sending his own sons 
to Rome for their education, and forming intimate friendships 
with Antony and other noble Romans. How could the 
manners and customs of their land and religion be said to claim 
dieir most passionate attachment, when we see kings and people 
so often sedulously cultivating the manners, arts, games, and 
vices, first of Greece and then of Rome ? 

As a people and a nation, whatever they might have professed , 
they acted contrary to the law of God, in plunging deeper 
and deeper into the dark abyss from which no arm either 
heavenly or earthly could l?e stretched forth to save them. To 
a certain body of the nation, the passage we have quoted 
may be applicable; and it is to them we allude, as in the midst 
of national anarchy and disobedience, even in the midst of their 
own too often mistaken zeal, the preservers of the religion 
and the law. 

To obtain a just and impartial estimate of the real character, 
intentions, and bearings of this body, known as the Pharisees, is 
to the Hebrew of the present day almost impossible. The Jew, 
whose mind and heart have been guided by his Talmudical 
studies, cannot fail to regard them with the deepest veneration 
and love ; — the Jew, who has known them only through the 
medium of Gentile writers, must unconsciously imbibe a portion 
of their feeling, and perhaps regard them only as superstitious 
eealots, following the letter of the law, but not its spirit The 


* Milman. 


PERIOD VI. THE ZADDIKIM. 


137 


allusions to the Pharisees, in the book which Gentiles believe 
divine, and the subsequent explanations in their various coni' 
mentaries, cannot fail to engender this spirit. But the Hebrew 
should guard against imbibing it, because the view is false in 
many of its bearings. It is very difficult, when we only possess 
histories written by Gentiles in a liberal and friendly spirit, and 
containing so much with which we can fully sympathize, to 
realize that on some points as Hebrews, our opinions must form 
themselves, and not be guided by those of the historian. The 
Pharisees is one of these — on which we must reflect and exer- 
cise our own judgment. The Rabbinical historian would 
unhesitatingly pronounce them saints, as little less holy or 
inspired than the prophets themselves ; — the Gentiles, as cruel, 
prejudiced bigots, hiding the most fearful vices under the mask 
of extremest sanctity. Both are probably wrong. The 
Pharisees were but men, liable to all the failings of humanity ; 
but their religion, even if carried beyond the law, was honest 
and sincere. The laxity and indifference of the multitude com- 
pelled a greater degree of strictness ; they were forced to raise 
around them a wall of exclusiveness, lest they too should fall. 
They beheld the awful evils creeping steadily amidst all ranks, 
and was it strange that they should have encouraged an 
unsocial spirit, and held themselves aloof? They beheld foreign 
manners and customs destroying the nationality of their people 
and land ; that the law of their God, which they justly held 
supreme, was disregarded ; and was it unnatural., that they 
should seclude themselves, proud of their spiritual superiority — 
or that their attachment to their land and Temple should 
increase in passionate intensity, as they beheld it so often 
trampled upon and desecrated by foreigners ? That a want of 
charity, of humility, of forbearance, marked their religion, 
might be ; nay, in that terrible period it could scarcely be other- 
wise. Party spirit even then had dried up the channels of 
social affection, and the spirit of love and meekness which the 
religion of Moses taught, could not be realized in the popular 
tumults and crimes for ever raging round them. Individuals 
\here were, no doubt, combining the pure spirit and loving mind 
with the outward ceremonial ; but in this brief sketch we can 
only generalize. Still, spite of their faults — spite of the too 
rigid, too exclusive notions, which, if indeed they had exist- 
ence, originated simply from the fear of being too lax, and 


138 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


sharing the indifference and infidelity of too many of theif 
fellows, the Pharisees must be regarded with veneration as the 
preservers of the law, 

Now should the Zaddikim, or righteous, bo passed unnoticed. 
Of these men we shall find no notice in the Talmudical writers, 
because they were opposed to much which that party considered 
of equal sanctity and obligation with the written law of God. But 
in an historical sketch, which, to be correct and useful, must be 
perfectly impartial, untinged by any individual feeling, we 
cannot refrain from noticing them, and in a very different spirit 
to the abhorrence with which they are generally regarded. 
However mistaken might have been some of their notions, 
however impossible to follow the law of the Eternal, without 
some regard to the useful practical explanations of the Elders ; 
still that they were as sincere and zealous as their opponents, 
cannot be doubted. These differing views aided materially in 
the preservation of the law, although the dissensions appeared 
to, and in fact did, increase the internal miseries and quarrels of 
J udea. 

Given up as they were to their own imaginations, tneir 
divine nature — apparently utterly lost in the dominion of evil 
passions — we seem to read but of anarchy and sin, more fear- 
ful than any which had come before, and increasing to a climax 
which compelled the chastisement so long deferred. But if 
with a faithful heart and unshrinking eye, we look within this 
rolling tumult — if we look beneath the stormy waves of dissen- 
sion and hate and wrath — we trace in the very elements that 
increased our miseries, those of our final preservation. We 
behold but the workers of evil, for wickedness ever comes 
uppermost ; but the faithful hearts, the enduring martyrs, the 
good, the true, are invisible in history, as in daily life, even as 
the still calm depths of the ocean, whose waves are in tumult 
and in storm. Never was the divinity of virtue entirely extinct, 
either in man or nations ; and we may rest content and satis- 
fied, that even in the midst of the blackened annals on which 
our eyes must rest, there was virtue and spirituality, and 
truth, sincerity, and zeal ; and that there will be these to the 
end of time — invisible in history, invisible in life, but working 
on silently and unceasingly, even to themselves, towards the 
purity, and elevation, and preservation of the religion of the 
Lord. Nor are such workers confined to one uarty or om 


PERIOD VI. GENERAL REVIEW. 139 

creed. Outwardly, eacli will condemn each; but inwardly, thev 
work together. 


CHAPTER IL 

FKOM THE APPEAL TO POMPEY TO THE DEATH 
OF HEROD. 

Hyrcanus’s quiet surrender of his authority was not of long 
continuance. Urged on by Antipater, the father of Herod, 
he again took the field; and after various alternations of 
success and defeat, both brothers appealed to Pompey, the 
Roman general ; — first by commissioners, and then, by com- 
mand, in person. 

Each produced defenders ; but many of the nation came to 
protest against both, as having illegally changed the form of 
government from the supremacy of the High Priest to that of 
king; a charge sufficient to confirm our idea that, from the 
death of Alexander, the former office had completely merged 
in the latter. The representatives of neither party, however, 
had much weight. Pompey decided as was best for his 
own and the Roman interest, only so far favoring Hyrcanus, as 
to tempt Aristobulus to resume hostilities ; convinced that so 
doing would only prove his weakness, make him prisoner to Pom- 
pey, and eventually cause the whole nation to submit ; and his 
prognostics were correct, with the sole exception of a remnant 
of Aristobulus’s faction, who threw themselves into the Temple, 
valiantly resolved to defend it to the last. 

After three months’ struggle, during which the cessation of 
warfare on the Sabbath had given the Romans their only 
advantage, the Temple was taken, and twelve hundred of the 
Jews slain. Amongst them were several priests, who, engaged 
m sacrifices and other services of the Temple at the moment 
of the assault, never moved from the altar, nor faltered in 
the performance of a single rite, but fell murdered where 


140 


IflE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


they stood firm and undaunted, and truly warriors of the 
Lord. 

The faction of Hyrcanus were amongst the most furious in 
the massacre of their countrymen, painfully proving the fearful 
effects of party spirit, and how completely nationality must 
at this period have been lost. Hyrcanus was nominated High 
Priest and Prince of the country, on condition of his submitting 
to the Roman government, paying tribute, making no effort 
to increase his territories, and never to resume the crown. 
The dignity was thus merely nominal, the independence of the 
country at an end, and Judea little more than a province of 
Rome. 

Aristobulus and his children, his sons, and two daughters, 
were carried captives to Rome. Alexander, one of these sons 
(and afterwards the father of Mariamne and Aristobulus), 
escaped on the journey to Rome, and returned to Judea. 

The desecration of the Temple by Pompev, in profaning 
its most sacred precincts, excited towards him the utmost 
hatred of the Jews — a hatred which caused them to behold his 
gradual decline with satisfaction, and wherever they were 
scattered, they simultaneously swelled the ranks of his rival 
Julius Caesar. 

From this period, in all the internal troubles of Judea, we read 
of her appealing to the Romans for assistance ; the never-failing 
method of kingdoms being entirely subjected by the party to 
whom they appeal. Hyrcanus did not enjoy his authority in 
peace — Alexander, the elder son of Aristobulus, above alluded 
to, raised a considerable force, and made every preparation for 
re-obtaining the possessions of his father. Gabinius, pro-consul 
of Syria, called in by Hyrcanus, made head against him, and 
compelled him t5 surrender his fortresses. Aristobulus himself, 
and his younger son, soon after escaped from Rome, and 
headed another revolt against Hyrcanus, but with worse for- 
tune ; the former, severely wounded, was sent back in chains to 
Rome — Antigonus, through the intercession of his mother, 
obtained his release. 

The form of government was then altered by Gabinius, 
proving the very small portion of dignity or independence which 
the nominal prince retained. Hyrcanus had had nothing to do 
with the revolts ; but we find him deprived entirely of the royal 
authority — and five senates, or sanhedrins, established at Jeru 


PERIOD VI. GENERAL REVIEW. 141 

salem, Jericho, Gadara, Amatheus, and Sepphoris. This govern- 
ment continued till ten years afterwards, when Caesar restored 
Hyrcanus to his former power. 

Though his arms were defeated, the spirit of Alexander, in 
whom all the courage, enterprise, and chivalry of the Asmo- 
naeans appeared to have centred, was still unsubdued. The 
moment Gabinius had drawn off his forces, intent on the 
conquest of Egypt, Alexander reappeared, drove the few 
remaining Romans into a strong position on Mount Gerizim, 
and there besieged them — courageously met Gabinius, who 
had returned on hearing of the revolt, valiantly gave him battle 
at the head of 80,000 men, and, though again defeated by the 
irresistible Roman arms, and compelled to take flight, bore with 
him his unconquered spirit still. 

Both he and his father, however, fell victims to the Roman 
civil war. Caesar had given Aristobulus his freedom, and com- 
manded him to create a diversion in Palestine in his favor. 
The adherents of Pompey poisoned the unfortunate prince on his 
journey. Alexander, who was levying soldiers in Judea for the 
assistance of Caesar, was seized at Antioch by Scipio, the friend 
of Pompey, and beheaded. Antigonus was, therefore, the only 
scion of the family of Aristobulus remaining. Hyrcanus 
retained the sovereignty in name, Antipater in power. Win- 
ning the favor of Caesar in his Egyptian wars, Antipater, while 
he demanded and received the re-establishment of the High 
Priesthood for Hyrcanus, obtained for himself all the rights of a 
Romar citizen, and the procuratorship of the whole of Judea. 
Soon after, presuming still more on the incapacity of the feeble 
prince whom he pretended to befriend, and on the friendship of 
the Romans, he made his eldest son, Phasael, governor of 
Jerusalem, and his younger, Herod, governor of Judea. This 
is the first mention of a character so intimately blended with 
the fortunes of the Jewish people. The brevity of our present 
sketch will not permit us even to attempt a delineation of the 
shrewd and sagacious policy, and unfailing enterprise, with 
which this extraordinary man made his way through the most 
adverse factions, both Jewish and Roman, to the supremacy of 
Judea, and to the intimate friendship of all the contending 
neads of Rome. Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Lepidus, and, finally, 
Augustus Caesar — men whose views w r ere never the same, were 
yet brought over by Herod’s indomitable will, to befriend and 


(42 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


exalt him. Much of his public, and almost all his private his 
tory, will be found in the memoir of Mariamne ; and, therefore, 
needs no mention here. We will merely touch on those points 
important in a national view. Antigonus, the sole surviving 
son of Aristobulus, still struggled for the crown. He obtained 
the succor of the Parthians, who overran Syria and Asia Minor, 
while he himself, with a large native force, entered Jerusalem 
and took possession of the Temple; the Hyrcanians, under 
Herod and Phasael, holding the palace. The Jews had, at that 
season, assembled from all quarters to celebrate the feast of 
Pentecost, and so thronged the ranks of the contending factions. 
How little did this national assemblage fulfil the spirit of the 
beautiful law which had thus called them together ! How 
appallingly they contradicted the spirit of the divine law and 
social unity ; for the encouragement of both which this holy 
festival had been instituted ! They celebrated the delivery of 
that holy Law which, in the very hour of its commemoration, 
they defiled ! 

The partial success of Antigonus in Jerusalem, through his 
Parthian allies, was more than balanced by the successful 
intrigues carried on by his rival Herod in Rome, to which city, 
after a multitude of adventures, he had safely escaped. His 
entreaty that the sovereignty of Judea might be conferred on the 
young son of Alexander gave the much coveted honor to himself; 
and, conducted to the Capitol by Antony and Octavius, he was 
there, in a heathen city , and with idolatrous sacrifices , anointed 
king over the holy people of a Most Holy God !* Will this 
fuliil the beautiful promises of the prophets ? this prove the 
nationality of the Jewish people at that period ? Alas ! thi° 
was but the commencement of denationalization ! 

But though nominally king, and aided by the all-powerful 
Roman influence, Herod was not universally received as sove- 
reign by the Jewish people until some years afterwards, when 
Antigonus, entirely defeated, surrendered at discretion ; and, in 
spite of his cowardly entreaties for life, was, at Herod’s solicita- 
tion, condemned by Antony, and by the axe of a common lictor 
received his death. 

Herod was now, indeed, sovereign of Judei. Never, before 
ihe Babylonish captivity, had the crown of Judah thus passed 

* Josephus ; and Jahn’s “ History of the Hebrew Commonwealth* 


PERIOD VI. REIGN OF HEROD 143 

into the family of an alien, who dared not assert himself of royal 
blood, and whose very birth as a Jew is doubtful. Josephus 
tells us that Antipater was indeed said, by Nicholas of Damas- 
cus, to be of the stock of the principal Jews, who came out of 
Babylon ; but “ that assertion of his was to gratify Herod, who 
was his son, and who came afterwards, by certain revolutions of 
fortune, to be King of the Jews.” It is evident, from this 
passage, that Josephus himself doubts Herod’s Jewish descent , 
and so must every one who reflects on his character and life. 
He thought of and pursued his own aggrandizement alone 
The kingdom of Judea was no more to him than any other ter- 
ritory ; it was no longer a holy land — no longer the land cf 
promise under the direct guardianship of the Most High. 
Where have we found, since the return from Babylon, that 
divine interference which, in the worst and darkest periods of the 
kingdom before the captivity, had been so distinctly visible ? 
Where do we ever read of the throne of Judea being obtained 
by aid of foreign powers? the holy kingdom allied with, or 
subordinate to, the heathen and idolator? The word of the 
Lord had passed, that the line of David (and consequently the 
tribe of Judah) was the line of kings appointed, and the only 
line recognisable by Him ; and, therefore, every prophecy 
alluding to the restoration of the kingdom is still to be ful- 
filled. The very fate of the Asmonaeans appears to evince the 
displeasure of the Eternal in their acceptance of the kingdom ; 
for they were not of His appointed race. As deliverers from 
the heathen, as restorers of the Temple and the religion, they 
were accepted individually in His sight ; but, from the very 
hour of their assumption of the royal dignity in the person of 
Aristobulus the First, only one who bore the Asmonaean name, 
Alexander Jannaeus, died naturally in his bed. And not the 
guilty alone ; the young and innocent — even those connected 
only by the mother’s side with the Asmonaeans, shared the 
same awful doom, which hemmed round, as by an impenetrable 
wall, the whole of that fated race. 

Success the most brilliant crowned every foreign policy 
of Herod. His marvellous ability extricated him from every 
difficulty, and pushed forward his successes, till he became the 
terror of all the surrounding nations. The country was at 
peace, breathing, as it were, once again, from the dissensions and 
miseries which, till the accession of Herod, had deluged Judea 
18 


144 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


with her own blood. But, though thus prosperous and at 
peace, it was the peace and prosperity of any of the heathen 
nations, not of the land of the Lord. 

Herod, a very doubtful Jew himself, felt that the strong and 
exclusive principles of nationality were adverse alike to foreign 
ambition or domestic greatness. The law of Moses undoubtedly 
circumscribed the regal power. Nor were foreign conquests 
admissible with the exclusiveness of the Hebrew people. 
To remove this barrier, and gradually prepare the minds of his 
subjects for foreign usages, Herod introduced all the Grecian 
and Roman games. A theatre was built within, and an amphi- 
theatre without, the walls of Jerusalem. Chariot-racing, boxing, 
the drama, even the gladiators and wild beasts were there intro- 
duced. The people submitted, but with silent abhorrence i for 
such sanguinary exhibitions, as the two last mentioned, were 
completely contrary to the mild and loving spirit of Mosaic 
law. 

Nor was this all. Building after building, all more ,,r less 
associated with the Roman and Grecian, rose up at the bidding 
of Ilerod. His first magnificent enterprise was a superb palace 
on Mount Sion ; his next was to rebuild and change into 
a strong fortress, the palace of Baris ; to erect citadels at Gaba 
in Galilee, and at Heshbon in Peraea ; and to rebuild Samaria 
on a scale of extraordinary magnificence, peopling it with 
his own soldiers, and the descendants of its former inhabitants. 
At a later period in his reign, he erected a sumptuous palace- 
fortress, in his usual style of architecture, on the spot where 
he had defeated Antigonus, seven miles from Jerusalem, round 
which a superb city speedily arose. 

He spent twelve years in the erection and decoration of 
a maritime city, which he called Caesarea, and almost entirely 
colonized with Greeks. It resembled in its sumptuous style of 
architecture, a city of gorgeous palaces. A great temple, dedi- 
cated to Augustus, occupied the centre, with two colossal 
statues, one of Rome and the other of Caesar ; and, of course, 
possessing the necessary appendages to a Grecian city, the 
theatre and amphitheatre, in which the usual heathen games 
were quinquennially performed. 

Was it strange, then, as they beheld this increase of heathen 
temples with every newly erected city, that the Jews should 
forget the magnificence of their monarch, in the terrible though 


PERIOD VI. REIGN OF HEROD. 


145 


that, slowly but surely, ho was carrying out his design of heathen- 
izing their country and themselves ? In some parts nationality 
was still awake, burning to throw off the yoke of one who 
had sunk them from their proud superiority as the Kingdom 
of God, to a level with the vassal-kings of Rome ; but though 
thoir murmurs were loud and deep, though conspiracies were 
continually forming, Herod retained his power, continuing 
to support his double character of Jew and Roman to the 
last. 

Hoping to ingratiate his people, and employ the disaffected, 
he determined to rebuild the Temple, which, from the lapse of 
500 years, and its repeated s'eges, had become, in some parts, 
dilapidated and ruinous. At first, the Jews feared that these 
professions did but conceal the intention of entirely destroying 
their solemn sanctuary ; but the immense preparations before 
the work of demolition began, removed the apprehension ; and 
with a delight and pride which, for the time, almost gave 
Herod favor in their sight, the nation beheld a beautiful fabric 
crowning Mount Moriah, with il masses of white marble, and 
pinnacles of gold.” But at the very time he was thus occupied 
as a Jewish king, he retained his character of a Roman vassal, 
by presiding at the Olympic games, making such magnificent 
donations for their support that he was elected their perpetual 
president ; and this man has been denominated the last inde- 
pendent sovereign of Judea — and the hapless people burdened 
with his idolatry and sins — as if he were one of them ! Who 
that reflects upon his reign alone, can associate for one moment 
the blessed promises of the prophets with the kingdom of Judea 
between the return from captivity and their final disper- 
sion ? 

The very sending his two sons to Rome for education, 
was a measure directly contrary to the law of Moses. Nor did 
it proceed only from his anxious desire to conciliate the Romans 
Herod was seldom actuated by but one motive. Looking upon 
the sons of Mariamne as his successors, he probably hoped that 
their Roman education would effectually remove all national 
prejudices, and render them able assistants in his ardent desire 
to Romanize his subjects, and gradually do away with all those 
remnants of that ancient superstition which excluded them from 
the conquests and ambition of other nations. The Jews, as 
a nation, were never in greater danger of becoming amalgam- 


146 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


ated with other countries, than in the reign of Herod ; but still 
the God of their fathers watched over them, preserving them for 
the sake of His changeless word, as his chosen people still ; 
interfering, not visibly, indeed, because of their awful crimes, but 
making even their threatening chastisement the means of their 
preservation. 

The law issued by Herod, decreeing that thieves should 
be sold into slavery out of the country, is another manifestation 
of his anxiety to adopt every measure for the denationalizing of 
Judea ; and from its direct disobedience to the law of Moses, 
was so obnoxious to the Jews, as to annul their rising gratitude for 
the rebuilding of the Temple. Nor was his last public act, the 
placing a large golden eagle over the great gate of the Temple, 
less offensive. It was torn down by two valiant youths, who 
were unhappily apprehended, and fell victims to his revenge. 
The horrible disease under which he labored increased his san- 
guinary propensities. Execution after execution followed, till 
scarcely a family was spared the agony of bereavement. His 
last barbarous order, that all the principal families of the nation 
should be seized, shut up in the llippodrone, and murdered the 
instant of his own death, that he might insure a general mourn 
ing, was happily disregarded, and the victims spared. 

And with such a command, died Herod, misnamed the Great, 
in the second year of the Christian era, and after a reign of 
thirty-four years as undisputed monarch. 

He has been termed the last independent sovereign of Judea ; 
but even in this brief survey, we have setn enough to convince 
us that the Jewish people were never further from national 
independence than in his reign ; that though a strong party of 
the people still remained zealous and earnest in the national 
cause, yet the extreme laxity of the Mosaic code, the fearful 
innovations adopted from heathen and foreign customs, the close 
intimacy with the Greeks and Romans, must have presented 
fearful temptations to the people generally, and hastened that 
day of destruction and dispersion, which the eye of Omniscience 
Raw, could alone preserve His holy law from annihilation, by its 
complete amalgamation with the surrounding nations. 


PERIOD VI. GENERAL SKE'JCH. 


14 ? 


CHAPTER III. 

GENERAL SKETCH CONTINUED FROM Till! 

DEATH OF HEROD TO THE WAR. 

For nine years the throne of Judea was occupied by Archelaus, 
the son of Herod and his sixth wife, Malthse, a Samaritan. 
Little of national interest occurred during that period except a 
constant reference to Rome (for the claims of Archelaus were 
disp jted by his brother, Herod Antipas) — repeated insurrections 
of the Jewish people, and, in consequence, numberless executions 
— and the increasing power of the Romans within Judea, who 
overspread the country, and ruled with such despotic hand, as 
to cause innumerable adventurers to spring up, collecting daring 
bands around them, who, either as robbers or lunatics, increased 
the wretchedness of the people. Archelaus appears to have 
neither possessed nor exercised any kingly power. In fact, we 
can scarcely regard him either as a Hebrew or a Hebrew king. 
His marriage with Glaphyra, the widow of his brother Alexander, 
and the mother of children by him, was in direct disobedience 
to the law of Moses, and consequently very obnoxious to the 
people : and so completely were himself and his kingdom in the 
power of the Romans, that the emperor would not even allow 
him the title of king, recognising him simply as the Ethnarch 
of Judea. In the tenth year of his reign, he was suddenly 
summoned to Rome, and thence banished to Vienne in Gaul, 
and all his estates confiscated. From that hour, though one or 
other noble Hebrew was continually rising, with claims to the 
sovereignty, Judea sank into a Roman province, dependent on 
the prefecture of Syria, with a subordinate administration of its 
own in a Roman governor, generally of the equestrian rank — 
and recognised in history as Procurator of Judea. 

Coponius, Marcus Ambivius, Valerius Gratus, and Pontius 
Pilate, successively enjoyed this office. During the reign of 
Caligula, we again read of the Jews being persecuted for their 
religion. That emperor, anxious to be universally acknowledged 
«s a god, was furious that a nation of captives (for such the Jews 


HR 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL, 


actually were) should dare to worship other than himself, and 
treated them with even more severity than any other of his sub* 
jects. In Rome, Syria, and Egypt, the nation felt the effects of 
the imperial tyranny ; but its only effect was to draw them yet 
closer together, and increase the value of that sacred religion, 
which both foreign and native princes seemed so determined to 
undermine. 

In Alexandria, their sufferings equalled the previous cruelties 
of Antiochus Epiphanes. The Roman Prefect of the period was 
Flaccus Aquilius, whose tyrannical oppressions even surpassed 
those of the Emperor himself. He was the first to deny the 
Jews their rights of citizenship ; and this without the smallest 
provocation on their part. Two quarters of the city were 
occupied by Jews, though many were also scattered about the 
other parts. Without any given reason, they were ordered to 
rerfiove into a district so small, that they were compelled to 
spread along the sea-shore, and take refuge even in the 
cemeteries.* Their homes were pillaged, the contents of their 
magazines and shops publicly divided; pestilential .disorders, 
from the heat and famine of their cooped-up abodes, broke out 
most fearfully, and when rendered desperate by their condition, 
they left their assigned quarter — a general massacre ensued. 
The sword and club, fire, scourging, suffocation, all were employed 
against them. Neither man, woman, nor child escaped ; and 
this continued, until, at length, the arrest of Flaccus, by order 
of the Emperor, put an end in a measure to these atrocities. 

In Babylon also there were persecutions, whose origin our 
readers will find in the authorities so often quoted, Josephus and 
Milman. In Judea images were raised all over the country, and 
nn edict issued to place the statue of Caligula in the Temple of 
Jerusalem. Once more the national spirit was aroused. 
Thousands of the Hebrews of either sex, and every rank and 
age, unarmed, and clad in sackcloth and ashes, traversed the 
land, solemnly protesting their intention to sacrifice their lives 
rather than consent to this awful profanation of their Temple. 
Petronius, an upright and humane man, sought to dissuade them 
from their resolution, urging the power of the Emperor, the 
submission of other nations, and the horrors of war. 

* Will not this remind us of a modern persecution 1 Alas ! the History 

the Jews can scarcely ever he considered Past. 


PERIOD VI. GENERAL SKETCH. 149 

“ We have no thoughts of war,” was their unanimous reply: 
* but we will submit to be massacred rather than thus infringe 
our Law and they fell with their faces to the ground, boldly 
offering their throats to the sword. 

The humanity of Petronius delayed the execution of the 
imperial mandate, on pretence of allowing time for the statue to 
be finished ; but it was to a native prince, yet more than to 
Petronius, that the Israelites owed their security. 

On the early and romantic history of Herod Agrippa, the son 
of Aristobulus and grandson of Mariamne, we cannot here be 
permitted to linger. He had been taken to Rome by his 
mother Berenice directly after his father’s murder ; and there, 
enjoying the favor and friendship of many noble Romans, had 
passed his youth. His varied fortunes might fill a volume. 
We can here only make such mention of him as is connected 
with this general sketch. Caligula had made him king of 
Gaulanitis, Batanea, and Trachonitis, and Tetrarch of Galilee 
and Persea. The greater part of what had formerly been the Holy 
Land in consequence belonged to him; but Judea was still 
possessed by Rome. 

Though educated in the Roman capital, and continually 
residing there, even after he was termed King of the Jews, 
Agrippa appears to have retained that strong feeling of nation- 
ality, and earnest love for his country and religion, so peculiat 
to the valiant founders of the Asmonsean race. On hearing of the 
disastrous alternative proposed to his countrymen in Judea — the 
desecration of their Temple or their entire destruction, he invited 
Caligula to a banquet, and treated him with such extraordinary 
splendor as to excite the astonishment of even that luxurious 
Sovereign, who, in the moment of enjoyment, desired him to 
ask a boon, which he swore to grant. The true Asmonsean 
blood flowed in the veins of the grandson of Mariamne. It 
was easy to have asked increase of dominion — of revenue — and 
thus have aggrandized himself ; but not such was his request ! 
He entreated the repeal of the fatal edict ; and, after a struggl? 
between wounded pride and his attachment to the petitioner. 
Caligula consented, and the decree was suspended. 

The murder of Caligula followed. Agrippa alone paid him 
the last honors. He could forget the vices of the man in the 
attachment of the friend. The peaceful acknowledgment of 
Claudius as emperor was mainly attributable to this Jewish 


150 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


prince, and Claudius did not forget the obligation. The inves 
titure of all the domains of the great Herod was conferred on 
Agrippa; Judea and Samaria were once again united with 
Galilee, Persea, ana the provinces beyond Jordan — forming one 
independent kingdom, which a public edict proclaimed as a 
donation from the Emperor to Agrippa ; between whom a treaty 
was formally concluded. 

Once more, then, for the brief interval of three years, did the 
Hebrews breathe in religious and moral freedom. Once more 
the reins of government were held by a native prince, whose 
Asmonsean descent rendered him universally popular, save to 
some stern zealots, whose factious spirits were ever on the watch 
for turbulence and blood. Once more we seem to associate with 
a people following the Law of God, ruled by a prince whose 
most ardent desire appeared to follow the statutes of Moses with 
the utmost exactness! Daily sacrifices were offered, legal 
impurities strictly prohibited, taxes remitted, the religion and 
comfort of his people made his first object ; while the munifi- 
cence and splendor of his court, the sumptuous buildings he 
erected, surrounded him with all the pomp and power of an 
independent Sovereign. His brief reign, marked as it is with 
such meek and gentle authority in the Sovereign, such calm and 
peaceful nationality in the People, shines forth like a bright star 
amidst the troublous wars and stormy clouds of awful darkness 
which it followed and preceded. Its beams had power to dis- 
perse, for a brief interval, the dim shadows of the past ; but the 
black wings of the future gathered round and shrouded up its 
mild light in such awful darkness that we almost forget it ever 
shone. 

The death of Agrippa, while it occasioned the deepest grief 
amongst the Hebrews, excited the most brutal exultation 
amongst the Greek inhabitants of Caesarea and Sebaste. The 
cause of this enmity appears an impenetrable mystery, Agrippa 
having treated them with unvarying kindness. Their insolent 
conduct occasioned Claudius to command the cohorts in their 
city to remove into Pontus, and their places to be filled with 
draughts from the legions in Syria We are particular in men- 
tioning this, because Josephus believes it to be the primary 
caase of the Jewish War. The mandate of the Emperor was 
not executed ; but the disgrace was equally the same ; and, 
••ankling in the hearts of the troops, exasperated them yet mow 


PERIOD VI. GENERAL SKETCH. 


151 


against the Hebrews, and incited those horrible acts of oppres- 
sion and cruelty which at length goaded Judea into a general 
revolt. 

The son of Agrippa (who bore the same name) being consi- 
dered too young to succeed him as sovereign, Judea relapsed 
into a Roman province. Agrippa remained at the court of 
Claudius, imbibing Roman feelings and Roman principles, so 
completely to the exclusion of nationality, as caused him, in the 
war which followed, basely to adhere to the Roman party, and 
to nake no effort to ameliorate the condition of his countrymen. 
He appears to have lived occasionally at Jerusalem, it Alexan- 
dria, and at Rome, enjoying at the former city the title of King, 
and the power of appointing High-Priests ; but otherwise his 
was a very empty dignity— the real government of the country 
resting in the hands of the Procurators. Rome, however, was 
his usual residence ; its luxurious enjoyment being more accord- 
ing to his vitiated taste than the bold stand for independence 
which his unhappy countrymen were making. The term of his 
death is uncertain ; but he died, as he had lived, forgetting the 
calamities and ruin of his country in the morally degraded, but 
physically secure condition of a Roman vassal. He was the last, 
either of the Asmonaean or Idumean race, who bore the title of 
King. 

Meanwhile, Zadus, Tiberius (an apostate Egyptian Jew, and 
consequently yet more odious to the people than the Romans 
themselves), Cumanus, Felix, Festus, Albinus, and Floras, had 
been successive Procurators of Judea ; occupying a period of rather 
more than twenty years — a term brief in itself, but fraught with 
increasing misery to the inhabitants of Palestine. Each Pro- 
curator appeared more oppressive, more exacting than the last. 
Insults from the Roman soldiery, constantly accompanying those 
religious forms and ceremonies, which, in consequence, had 
become yet dearer, were answered by fiery spirits ripe for ven- 
geance ; and this, of course, was followed by indiscriminate 
slaughter of the Jews. Massacres of hundreds, even of thou- 
sands, took place under every Procurator, not only in Judea but 
in Syria ; and we are told that, after the defeat of the Romans 
under Cestus by the excited Hebrews, the citizens of Damascus 
massacred ten thousand of their Hebrew brethren, notwithstand- 
ing their own wives were all attached to Judaism. 

Pillage and insult, of course, accompanied these fearful 


152 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


massacres. All legal authority was at an end. Though 
the high priesthood was retained, the temple worship continued, 
the outward ordinances of the feasts and fasts observed, yet the 
beautiful laws, guiding not only communities but households, 
were swallowed up in the vortex of oppression, insult, and 
misery, which, tinder the administration of Florus, reached 
its crisis. The evil passions of man were alone visible. Rob- 
bers and assassins, the last blaspheming the mild law of Moses, 
by pretending its authority for their deeds of blood — wero 
amongst the Jews themselves — and devastated both pro- 
vince and city. Divided within themselves — so goaded by 
oppression, that the dictates of humanity were unheard — party 
spirit utterly preventing that national union which alone could 
hope for success — without a leader — without a plan — for 
the most part regardless of the laws of either God or man; 
such was the condition of the country on the eve of its general 
revolt. Darkness, morally and mentally, had gathered round ; 
and it was no marvel. The return from Babylon had been 
granted as a trial of their return to their God and the pure 
worship of their ancestors. He inspired a heathen sovereign to 
grant them liberty and independence. It was in their power 
then to have come back, heart and soul, to the pure and faith- 
ful observance of His law, to the making the Land of Promise 
once more a Holy Land — resting on the blessing, the guidance, 
the sovereignty of their God. He gave them free will to choose ; 
and we have seen that choice : — a union from the first with sur- 
rounding nations, a lingering amidst the heathen lands, or invi- 
tations to the heathen within their own — adoption of heathen 
customs — faithful in the hour of persecution, only to relapse 
into indifference when the iron rod was withdrawn — the Priest- 
hood, the Sovereignty stained with crimes, even to read which 
causes the blood to curdle — alliance with the Heathen Mistress 
of the world, instead of that pure reliance on the Eternal 
to increase prosperity and dominion, which His law ordained — 
the holy religion he deigned to teach, so fitted for every class 
and condition of men, split into opposing factions, arming each 
against the other — statues and images desecrating the Temple 
and the land, erected indeed by the Romans, but originating 
primarily in the Jewish assimilation and alliance with that 
nation. Was it marvel that the Eternal, in His justice, should 
make the sin of their assimilation with other nations the vert 


PERIOD VI. GENERAL SKETCH. 


153 


means of their punishment ? — and that the power they had 
courted, flattered, made voluntary submission to (because 
the Roman name was omnipotent in earthly glory, earthly 
greatness, forgetting that if they trusted in and served their 
God, His word had gone forth to make them greatest amongst 
the nations) was it marvel that that power should be the instru- 
ment in the Eternal’s hand to execute His wrath ? We shud 
der at the horrible oppressions of which we read. Its human 
agency must excite our abhorrence, as it would the anger of 
the Lord ; but on themselves the Jews had hurled it ; they 
reaped the wretchedness their own hands had sown. 

But let it not be supposed, in the fearful state to which 
the nation was reduced, that there w T ere none to uphold the glory 
of the Lord, and be his witnesses on earth. In the tumultuous 
annals of the period — in the vast and whelming ocean ot 
despair and misery and crime, how may the historian discern 
and bring forward those who were yet faithful and accepted ser- 
vants of the most high God ? Yet even as the Eternal pro- 
mised that Israel should never cease from being a nation before 
Him, so has he equally promised that He would never be 
without his witnesses on earth ; and, therefore, are we bound to 
believe that even in this awful epoch of Jewish history, aye, 
throughout its dark annals of previous years, there were yet, as 
there had been in the days of Elijah, “ seven thousand who had 
not bowed the knee to Baal.” In every faction, every party, 
there were noble and faithful spirits of either sex acting or endur- 
ing a martyr’s part — leavening many a mass of otherwise foul 
iniquity, and as acceptable to the Almighty as the saints of old. 
We see them not, we know them not, for not on earth may we 
“ discern between the righteous and the wicked” — not on earth 
may their fate be distinct — not in the threatened vengeance of 
the Eternal might a miracle interpose to protect His faithful 
from the destruction waiting the rebellious and the sinful, but in 
His heaven, the distinction between him that serveth Him and 
him that served him not, was made. And therefore did he permit 
universal misery and destruction to whelm all on earth, as a warn- 
ing to the nations, as a witness of His word, a fulfilment of his 
threatened wrath for disobedience ; preparing for the thousands 
that had not bowed the knee to Baal, such transcendent glory 
and unspeakable happiness with Him that the evils they had 


154 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


endured below seemod but as “a watch in the night,”— or 
as the transient pang of “ yesterday when it is passed.” 

In this rapid ana very imperfect sketch of the history of 
Judea, from the return from Babylon to the commencement of 
the war under the administration of the odious Florus, a.c. G6, 
we have seen how little of rest or independence she enjoyed — 
that in fact massacre and persecution even for religion may 
be dated many years, even centuries, before the general dispersion 
- — that the national divisions of tribes, both of land and people, 
were entirely lost — the throne not once occupied by that royal 
branch of David which the Eternal has so expressly promised — 
that the Jews had settled by their own will in various parts 
of the word besides Jerusalem. And, having seen all this, do 
we need more than a knowledge of our own history to refute the 
assertion of our adversaries, that our return from Babylon 
fulfilled the prophecies ? Shall we not rather, in deepest grati- 
tude and consolation, take them to our hearts and believe 
in their fulfilment yet to come ! rejoicing even as did the 
venerable Akiba, who laughed when his companions wept, 
at beholding a fox run out from the place where the Holy 
of Holies once stood ; and, being asked the wherefore of 
such unseemly mirth, replied by inquiry wherefore they wept: 
“ Should we not weep,” they answered, “ when we see the curse 
so clearly verified : ‘ for the mountain of Sion, foxes shall walk 
upon it !’ ” 

“ And therefore do I laugh,” replied the venerable man. 
“ Whilst the evil remained unaccomplished, there might 
have been doubts entertained for the fulfilment of the good 
promised by our prophets; but now, when we see the evil 
coming to pass, can we possibly doubt the eventual fulfilment of 
the consolation of Zion, and does not God rather reward 
than punish ?” And shall we not also rejoice ; for Akiba’s 
hope is ours I 


PERIOD VI. — THE MARTYR MOTHER. 155 


CHAPTER IV 

THE MARTYR MOTHER. 

In a time so fraught with national confusion, foreign alliances, 
treacherous peace, or destructive war, as the period which our 
sketch comprises, history reveals but little to aid us in our 
attempt to delineate the character and condition of our female 
ancestors. Yet that little is most important, tending unanswer- 
ably to prove the exaltation of our social position, the elevation 
of our individual character, and also to convince us that there 
w T as not a single law then in force that could, either morally, 
physically, or socially debase us. We shall find the influence of 
woman actuating man, in more than one instance, for the evil 
unhappily, also with the good ; but the very power of the evil 
is, as we have before said, an argument in favor of our equality 
and freedom. 

During the persecution under Antiochus Epiphanes, the 
sufferings of the women of Israel must have been as fearful, as 
their constancy and fidelity were powerful proofs, of the perfect 
adaptation of the Law of the Eternal, to their temporal and 
spiritual wants. Never could a religion which made them soul- 
less slaves, have become so dear, so part of their very hearts, 
that it was easier to endure torture, and slavery, and death 
rather than depart from it themselves, or refuse its privileges to 
their infant sons. Eighty thousand persons, men, women, and 
children, slain in the forcible entrance of Antiochus within Jeru- 
salem, and forty thousand of both sexes sold into slavery, was 
the horrible preface to the misery which followed. Every 
observance of the Law, from the keeping of the Sabbath and the 
Covenant of Abraham, to the minutest form, was made a capital 
offence. Yet, in spite of the scenes of horror so continually 
recurring, the very relation of which must now make every 
female heart shrink and quiver — yet were there female martyrs 
baring their breast to the murderous knife, rather than bow 
down to the idol, or touch forbidden food. Women, young, 
meek, tender, performed with their own hands the Covenant of 


150 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


Abraham upon their sons, because none else would so dare the 
tyrant’s wrath; and with their infants (for whose immortal 
souls they had thus incurred the rage of man) suspended round 
their necks, received death by being flung from the battlements 
of the Temple into the deep vale below ; others were hung, and 
cruelties too awful to relate practised upon others. Yet no 
woman’s spirit failed ; and what must have been their attach- 
ment to their holy religion, what their sense of its responsibility, 
and its immortal reward, what their horror of abandoning it 
themselves and cutting off their sons from its sainted privileges, 
to incur martyrdoms like these ? It is useless to argue that 
persecution always creates martyrs, as opposition kindles con- 
stancy. The religion degrading or brutalizing woman never 
yet had martyrs. The Catholic, the Protestant have had their 
martyrs in young and feeble women equally with ourselves ; 
because their religion, founded upon ours, shares its heavenly 
privileges and spiritual love, and twines itself so round a weman’s 
clinging breast, that it is far easier to die for it than live without it, 
by apostasy and falsehood. But where do we find a Mahomedan 
female enduring martyrdom rather than forsake the religion of 
the Prophet (so called) ? History does not present us with one 
example ; and why ? The reply is easy. We will not say one 
word against the religion itself ; because, equally with the 
Nazarene, it is doing the work of the Eternal, and teaching 
many nations to worship the one sole God. But its doctrine 
degrades woman in very truth to be the slave of man — gives 
her neither temporal nor spiritual privileges — treats her, looks on 
her as a being without soul, or, if possessing one, created even in 
Heaven only to minister to man’s pleasures.* Is it marvel then, 
the Eastern women are now indeed degraded, or that amongst 
them we should never read of martyrs ? But not such were the 
women of the East when it was peopled by the nation of the 
Lord ! 

Where, in the vast tomes of history, sacred or profane, shall 
we find a deed more heroic, a fortitude more sublime, than is 
recorded of Haunah, the Hebrew mother, during the persecution 
of Antiochus ? We read in the second Maccabees, chap. vii n 

* Such at least are its reported doctrines. We cannot vouch for then 
truth or falsehood, not knowing sufficient of the religion itself, or i‘3 fol 
lower*. 


PERIOD VI. THE MARTYR MOTHER. 167 

confirmed also by all our Hebrew writers, that a mother and 
her seven sons were taken, and brought before the tyrant; 
who, in the wantonness of cruelty, commanded them to eat the 
forbidden meat, commencing first with the more moderate tor- 
ment of whips and scourges, but heightening them gradually to 
tortures, which we leave our readers to peruse in the chapter we 
have quoted : for the soul sickens to dwell upon them, as 
deliberately to write them down : we will content ourselves with 
repeating the words they spake in the midst of dhose appalling 
sufferings ; for surely they are in themselves witness of what the 
religion of the Eternal taught. 

“ What wouldst thou ask or learn of us ?” the first said : 
“ We are ready to die rather than transgress the laws of oui 
fathers.” And as his brethren beheld his lingering torments, 
instead of failing, they exhorted one another, and their mother, 
to die manfully, saying thus, “ The Lord God looketh upon us, 
and in truth hath comfort in us, as Moses, which in his song, 
witnessed to their faces, declared : and he shall be comforted in 
his servants.” To the second the question was put, “ Wilt 
thou eat ?” under threat of similar tortures, which he had wit- 
nessed, but in vain. “ Thou, like a fury, takest us out of this 
life,” he said, in the very agonies of death ; “ but the King of 
the World shall raise us up, who have died for his laws, unto 
everlasting life .” The third himself stretched forth his limbs 
for the torture, saying, “ These I had from Heaven, and for His 
Law I despise them, for from, him I expect to receive them, 
again” Inasmuch as the king and those that were with him, mar- 
velled at the young man’s courage, for that he nothing regarded 
his pains. The fo'irth then suffered, and he said, “ It is good 
being put to death by man, to look for hope from God to be 
raised up again for Him ; as for thee, thou shalt have no 
resurrection to life.” And the fifth, in his dying agony, calmly 
looked upon the king, and said, “ Thou hast power over men, 
but art corruptible ; thou doest what thou wilt ; but think not 
our nation is forsaken of God ; but abide awhile, and behold His 
great power, how He will torment thee and thy seed.” And 
the sixth being ready to die, emulating his brothers’ constancy, 
addressed the tyrant, “ Be not deceived without cause : we suffer 
these things for ourselves having sinned against God, therefore 
marvellous things are done unto us ; but think not thou, who 


158 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


takest in hand to strive against God, that thou shalt escapa 
unpunished.” 

Nor was it one alone who thus endured. The Hebrew 
mother witnessed these agonizing tortures, done not unto one, 
but unto six of her cherished offspring. Yet how do our elders 
speak of her: “The mother was marvellous above all, and 
worthy of honorable memory ; for when she saw her seven sons 
slain within the space of one day, she hare it with a good courage , 
because of the hope that she had in the Lord. Yes, she exhorted 
every one of them in her own language, filled with courageous 
spirit, and stirring up her womanish thoughts with a manly 
stomach, she said unto them, ‘ I cannot tell how ye came into 
my womb, for I neither gave you breath nor life ; neither was it 
I who formed the members of every one of you ; but, doubtless, 
the Creator of the world, who formed the generation of man, 
and found out the beginning of all things, will also of His own 
mercy , give you breath and life again, as ye now regard not 
your ownselves for His law’s sake.’ ” 

Quaint and terse as this language is, and devoid of all orna- 
ment, yet how emphatically it breathes of the extent of this 
mother’s trial, the struggle with her “ womanish feelings,” and 
her triumph over nature, over humanity, through that super- 
human faith ! Nor is the trial over. One still remained — her 
youngest born ; probably still the tender and best-beloved of his 
mother — one round whom the bleeding tendrils of her lacerated 
heart must have clung in such unutterable love ; her last, her 
loveliest; and, evidently, from the tyrant’s own words, one in 
the first and freshest prime of youth, when life has so many rich 
enjoyments, it seems doubly hard to turn from them to the 
cold, dark grave; and heaven’s perfected happiness, to such 
ardent spirits, feels dim and distant, compared to the present 
joy of earth. We know he was of such an age, and such 
aspirings, else the temptations of the tyrant would not have been 
couched in promises to make him a rich and happy man, and 
take him for his friend, and trust him with affairs, only on con- 
dition of his deserting the law of his fathers : and when the 
young man would not hearken to him, the king called upon the 
mother, and exhorted her with many words to counsel him tc 
save his life. He believed nature, in such a case, must triumph : 
for he knew not the hope beyond the grave, which could stili 


PERIOD VI. THE MARTYR MOTHER. 159 

;iie throbbings of maternal love ; and bid, even on earth, the 
Angel triumph over the Human — the Immortal shine above the 
Mortal ! 

Calmly she listened to the tyrant’s “ many words,” and then 
bowing to him as about to obey, addressed her son in her own 
language, “ Oh, my son, have pity on me who love thee, and 
gave thee suck three years, and nourished thee, and brought 
thee up unto this age, and endured the troubles of education, I 
beseech thee, my Son, look upon the Heaven and upon the 
earth, and all that is therein, and consider ithat God made them 
of things that were not, and so was mankind also. Fear not 
this tormentor, but, being worthy of thy brethren, .ake thy 
death, that I may receive thee again in mercy with thy brethren .” 
And even while she was yet speaking, the young man said, 
“ Whom wait ye for ? I will not obey the king’s command- 
ment ; but I will obey the commandment of the Law that was 
given unto our Fathers by Moses. And thou that hast been the 
author of all the mischief against the Hebrews, shalt not escape 
the hands of God ; for we suffer because of our sins ; and though 
the living God be angry with us a little while for our chasten- 
ing and correction, yet He shall return, and be again with His 
servants. But thou, O most godless man, and of all others 
most wicked, be not lifted up without cause, nor puffed up with 
uncertain hopes, lifting up thy hand against the servants of God : 
for thou hast not yet escaped the judgment of Almighty God, 
who seeth ah things. For our brethren who now have suffered 
a short pain, are dead under God's covenant of everlasting life ; 
but thou, through the judgment of God, shalt receive just 
punishment for thy pride. But I, like my brethren, offer up my 
body and life for the Laws of our Fathers, beseeching God that 
He would speedily be merciful unto our nation, and that thou, 
by torments and plagues, mayst confess that he alone is God, 
and that in me, and in my brethren, the wrath of the Almighty, 
which is justly brought upon all our nation, may cease.” Then 
the king being in a rage handled him worse than all the rest, 
and took it grievously that He was mocked ; so this man died 
undefiled, and put his whole trust in the Lord. Last of all, after 
the sons, the mother died. “ Let this be enough,” the writer 
•includes, “ now to have spoken concerning the idolatrous 
feasts, and the extreme tortures.” 

Enough ? It is enough indeed for every Israelite to dwell 


160 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


npon, not with shuddering horror, not with that squeamist 
kind of affected feeling which pretends incapacity to look fear- 
ful truths in the face, but with emotions of intense thankfulness, 
that such a record has been left us, bearing such faithful witness 
as it does to the true Israelite’s belief. It is not merely a record 
of superhuman heroism, alike in male and female. It is 
not merely a proof of the little moment in which torture and 
death were held by the Hebrews, compared with which the far 
famed firmness of Spartan and Roman mothers sinks into 
nothing. It is the doctrines betrayed throughout, which, reveal- 
ed at such a moment, must have impregnated the very existence 
of the Israelite ; and these doctrines may be treasured up as 
invaluable evidences of all which was taught by our Holy Law, 
however some may disbelieve the actual Tale of Martyrdom 
in which they are disclosed. The books of the Maccabees 
in the Apocrypha are on all points the exact counterpart of the 
same history in Josephus, and also of Antiochus Epiphanes in 
Roll in. 

There can be no doubt that the books were written by 
a Hebrew for his countrymen ; and therefore the words put into 
the mouths of the sufferers must have been the exact transcript 
of the Hebrew’s true belief. If the doctrine of immortality — 
that hope beyond death and the grave — was, as it is reported, 
unknown and unrevealed to the Israelites, what could have 
inspired, not only the hope itself, but the expression of that 
hope, in the very midst of torture and anguish which human 
nature of itself could never have sustained ? We have quoted 
the words of the sufferers at full length, only to illustrate this 
doctrine — to prove, that, all of immortality — of resurrection — 
of being with God in Heaven — of re-union there with our 
beloved ones — of the transientness of the severest agonies 
below compared to the permanency of bliss awaiting us above 
— that all was revealed to us, all was known to every Hebrew 
— male and female, childhood and age — believed in, acted upon, 
ages before the advent of that religion which was the first, her 
followers believe, to inculcate such doctrines. In a work 
like the present, we may not dilate on this glorious subject 
as much as inclination prompts — but oh ! let us not, by present 
indifference, by stagnant ignorance, or fearful shrinking from 
the idea of death, give our opponents only too much reason 
to believe, that to them alone has been revealed the con- 


PERIOD VI. — THE MARTYR MOTHER. 1G1 


tolation, the glory, the blessedness of the belief and hope in 
Immortality. 

Great emergencies will often create great characters ; but in 
the narrative which we have been considering, we read some- 
thing more in the character of the Hebrew mother, than even 
the heroism which she displayed. By her close connexion with 
her sons, in being brought before the tyrant, and condemned to 
share their fate, it is clear that though a woman in Israel, her 
influence must have been supposed of some consequence. That 
her sons owed their all to her, even to their education, and that 
her influence on them was very great, we read alike in her own 
words, and in the appeal of the king to her, to save b) her 
exhortations her youngest born. There is no mention of a 
father ; she had probably been from the infancy of her children, 
that especially beloved of the Eternal, a widow in Israel. 
And in the calm courage, the noble words of each of her sons, 
we learn the education she had given. They had probably been 
amongst the valiant, though unsuccessful defenders of their 
land ; amongst the faithful few, w'ho, in the very face of the per- 
secutor, dared to obey the law of Moses, and refused every effort 
to turn them from their God. Would this patriotism, this 
devotedness, have come at the moment needed, had it not been 
taught, infused from earliest boyhood — by example as well as 
precept ? A mother in Israel could be herself no warrior, but 
she could raise up warriors — she could be no priest, but she 
could create priests — she could not face the battle’s front, 
or drive the idolatrous invader from God’s Iloly Land — she 
could not stem the torrent of persecution and of torture ; but 
she could raise up those who would seek the one, and, by 
unshrinking death, bear witness to the fruitless efforts of the 
other ; and it was these things this heroic mother did. She had 
trained up her boys in that faithfulness, that constancy, which 
could only spring from virtue. She must have taught them, 
aye, infused it with her very milk, that the pains and troubles 
of this world are, in their sharpest agony, but of a moment’s 
duration, compared with the everlasting blessedness awaiting 
them in Heaven. She must have taught them, that death itself 
was but a darkened portal, opening into an infinity of glory , 
(hat man might, indeed, have power over this present life; but 
over the future, what mortal could have dominion ? — that all 
they possessed, even to the members of the body, life itself, they 


1C2 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


had had from God, to whom they were ready to resign, them 
knowing that from him they would be received again — that even 
in that extremity of bodily torture, their lot was happier than 
that of their tormentor, for their heritage was everlasting, but 
his w«s corruptible, ar.d vanishing with a breath. She must 
have taught them in the true spirit of the Law, that, however 
persecuted, however sinful in themselves, their nation would 
never be forsaken by God ; yet, that it was for their sins they 
suffered, not to gratify the exulting tyranny of their persecutor, 
but for themselves, for the sins of their hapless countrymen. 
Their sufferings in the flesh were to make manifest to the whole 
world, God’s judgment upon His children for their national 
sin ; but that still to the virtuous, even such a death had no 
sting, for their earthly sufferings bore witness to the justice; and 
their Heavenly reward, to the mercy of their God. She must 
have infused within them, that pure beautiful spirit of self- 
devotion, which is woman's own , and can only be imparted by 
woman to the more selfish, more calculating man, else we 
should not find the last and youngest martyr, beseeching God, 
even at that terrible moment, to turn His just wrath 
from His people ; and that the sacrifice of himself and his 
brethren for the laws of their fathers, might be so accepted as to 
cause the national misery to cease. All this (and in such 
doctrines, how much more is comprised than we can trace in a 
brief c.urvey!) she must have taught her boys. We hear her 
herself refer to the labors of education, as an additional incen- 
tive to her son’s obedience ; and we must be convinced, that all 
their heroism, firmness, self-devotedness sprang from her, and 
had become part of their very being, years before such exalted 
principles were thus called upon to be displayed. 

Will not this narrative then strongly confirm all that we have 
stated in the second chapter of our second period, as elevating 
the position and marking the duties of Jewish mothers ? Will 
it not prove that the mothers of Ancient Israel were perfectly 
aware of all the responsibility attendant on them, in the edu« 
cation of their sons — and that they really were included in the 
charge of Moses, contained in Deut. vi. 20 — 25. The education 
given by this martyr mother to her sons, is an exact illustration 
of the manner in which these ordinances were obeyed, including 
also the instruction in the history, theocracy, and claims of 
Israel down to the times in which they lived. And how onifl.d 


PERIOD VI. THE MAR1IR MOTHER. 103 


this be, if tlie Jewish female were lowered by social treatment to the 
position of a slave or a heathen, on whom no responsibility, no reli- 
gious duty devolved. Be the narrative itself truth or tradition, it 
matters not; the ancient fathers would never have given woman 
that influence and elevation in tradition , which had not its founda- 
tion in truth — would never have made her occupy that position 
in tradition which the ordinance of the law forbade. This 
consideration is most important to us : for we are now rapidly 
advancing to the period, whence it is said Modern Judaism, in 
contradistinction to Ancient Judaism, takes its rise. There will 
be many perhaps to agree with the theories formed on Scrip- 
ture, already brought forward ; but to declare it is Modern, or 
what is termed Rabbinical Judaism, which they condeun. We 
hope to satisfy such inquirers, that even in rabbinical Judaism 
there is no foundation whatever for the degradation of woman. 

And what were the “ wages” received by the martyr mother, 
for thus “ nursing her boys for God ?” Could it be their earthly 
tortures, their agonizing deaths ? Alas ! what female heart, 
in its first natural weakness, will not shrink and quiver, and feel, 
if such must be her wages, how can she nurse her child for God \ 
How mav she instil such feelings, if torture and death must be 
their reward ! Why are obedience, constancy, allegiance, virtue, 
said to be acceptable to the Most High, when such is their 
earthly end, and the sinful, the faithless, the apostate are spared 
and enjoy ? Let us ponder on what was the support, the hope, 
aye even at that moment, the triumph, of Hannah .* Did she 
feel as if that trial’s intolerable agony were indeed her “ wages ?” 
W e know not how a frail weak woman could thus have looked 
on, and instead of unnerving them by cries and sobs, encouraged 
them to suffer still. God gave her power (it was not in 
humanity), and so increased the strength, the might, the vivid- 
ness, of those hopes beyond the grave, which she had felt and 
realized so long, that the blessedness awaiting her children with 
their God, seemed palpably revealed. The veil of flesh, of 
corruption, was rent from her mortal eyes, and all which the 
Lord had prepared for those that love Him, unseen by human 
eye and unheard by human ear, was through her pure Faith 
disclosed ; nothing else could have so sustained her, or given 

* She is so called m Rollin, though I know not from what authoritj 
he takes the name. 


164 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


the immortal spirit such dominion. We are expressly told 
“ she stirred up her womanly thoughts with a manly resolve.” 
Consequently we know and feel, that she had all a woman’s 
nature. “ Take thy death,” she bade her youngest born, “ that 
[ may receive thee again in mercy with thy brethren .” Had an 
angel from Heaven spoken in her ear these words, she could 
not have believed more strongly. “ The Lord will of His own 
mercy give you life and breath again,” she had before said; and 
if she had fear when she exhorted her youngest born, it was, not 
that he should pass away from her earthly love, but by his 
acceptance of the tyrant’s proffers, be lost to her in Hearen ; 
Faith, Trust, Hope, these then were her sustainers : she had 
Drought up her children not for Earth, but fci Heaven ; not for 
Time but for Eternity ; and she knew that she should receive 
her wages, not from Earth but in His presence, for whom her 
boys were martyred ; and can we doubt for a single moment that 
those “ wages” were received — can we believe in the God of love, 
whom Pentateuch, Psalms, and Prophets, all reveal, and yet 
allow the faintest shadow of an unbelieving thought to come 
across our minds ? Can we with a sceptic’s fearful scorn, refuse 
faith in another purer, lovelier world, where such noble and 
faithful spirits receive their promised recompense, because to 
the finite sight, hearing, and wisdom, of frail poor humanity, it 
has not been visibly or palpably revealed ? No ! no ! stagnant 
and indifferent as Israel may sometimes appear, he never has 
thus fallen, never can reject that unutterably consoling revela- 
tion of immortality, which became his own glorious heritage, 
long long ages before it was vouchsafed to the Gentile world. 

By the words “ Last of all, after the sons, the mother died,” 
and no mention of tortures, we may hope that, if the tyrant 
commanded her death, it v-as comparatively easy, or, which is 
our own belief, that the Eternal, in Ilis infinite mercy, Himself 
called her to rejoin her sons, never, never more to be separated 
from them. The spirit might be supernaturally strengthened, 
to make manifest, such firmness and faithfulness as would exalt 
the glory of the Lord ; but the physical powers must have sunk 
beneath it. And if the tyrant did indeed put the seal to the 
work of butchery by slaying her, he did but forestall the death 
which would inevitably have come — and his cruelty in this 
instance was mercy. 

If may be said, that striking' as this narrative is, it cannot 


PERIOD VI. THE MARTYR MOTHER 


165 


hear upon us now, either as guidance or example, and that, even 
if it could, it would be impossible for us to imitate the heroism 
of which we read. Earnestly we trust that such manifestations 
of faithfulness are indeed no longer needed. 

Yet that mother’s lessons may still be to us as guidance — 
may teach us how we should instruct our children, so as tc 
provide them against the arrows of misfortune, which ere life 
close may assail them, either through bodily affliction or mental 
woe. Religion, real spiritual religion, will not find resting in 
the human heart unless infused — unless made the first great 
object in childhood : not to affect with gloom, but inexpressibly 
to deepen the enjoyment and hilarity of youth. Affliction may 
do the work for us in riper years, and bring the soul to its God — 
because earth has become a void — its former pleasures dashed 
wi.h poison ; but oh ! it is a fearful thing, when we wait for 
affliction to teach us our God — when sorrow must be sent to 
bring us to Him. If the mother would but look forward — 
— would but sometimes think that the sweet and smiling babe 
upon her lap, the laughing girl and merry boy, now playing 
in such shadowless glee around her knee, may one day be 
bowed down in sorrow, exposed to bodily pain — to bereavement 
— to one or more of the numberless sorrows ever incidental to 
humanity ; nay, to privation of health, of sight, of use of limb — 
will they not, must they not seek to provide them with some 
unfailing refuge, some fadeless hope and inward consolation? 
Why are they so anxious to provide for their temporal welfare, 
to secure provision for earthly wants, resources of education, 
enjoyment, ambition, wealth ? — why fill the infant mind with 
every branch of learning, and train it to think, and calculate, and 
act ? Why be so careful of all these things, did not the thought 
of the Future guide the workings of the Present — did not love 
itself become ambition, and future hope inexpressibly heighten 
present enjoyment ? And these thoughts, these hopes, are 
natural, and right : but why provide only for a future of Success 
and of Joy ? These things may be. It may please our Father 
in Heaven to fulfil the mother’s every wish, and make her child’s 
future as smiling as its present; but it may equally please Him 
to try that cherished darling in the ordeal of adversity ; and 
then, if he have only been provided for a future of prosperity, oh, 
what shall sustain him ? How may he bear up against the 
trials which may be his, as well as of thousands of his fellows ? 


lG6 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 

No ! mothers of Israel : let us ever train our children for a 
future, and strengthen them for sorrow as well as for joy. Should 
we think our duty done did we provide them only with summei 
clothing, and expose them unprotected to the wintry blast and 
howling storm ? Might they not with justice reproach us in 
the first tempest, if we bade them thus set forth on the journey 
of life ? However smiling as far as the eye can pierce, is not 
the horizon enveloped in such mists, that we know not whether 
it conceal sunshine or storm — and shall we send forth our 
beloved one provided only for the one ? 

Let it not be thought that, to inculcate piety — that clinging 
love of and confidence in God, the only support of menta. or 
bodily affliction — demands a relinquishment of the bouyant 
light-heartedness of childhood. Far from it. The peculiar 
susceptibility of childhood to emotions of gladness and love, 
renders the task easy and most blessed (if the right moment 
be seized) to lift up the young spirit to the kind and loving 
Father who has given so many things to love and to enjoy. And 
when the young mind -has expanded to a consciousness of the 
temporal enjoyments it has received from God, let it rise still 
higher, in the tale of that world where there is no sin, no pain, 
no change, but where joy and love live for ever — where their 
souls will be with God and His angels, if they seek to live there, 
and in all they do, and think, and feel, pray and seek to love 
and serve the heavenly Father who is so good to them in this 
w 7 orld, and has provided such a home for them with Him 
Teach them that sorrow and pain are not proofs of their Father’? 
wrath , but of His love — that all he does is love, however we may 
not understand it — that much, very much, must puzzle us while 
we are on earth, but that we shall understand it all in Heaven, 
and till then, if we will but believe He loves us, aud all he does 
is love, we may be sorrowful and sad for a time ; but we know 
He will once more give us joy. 

Lessons like these, united 'with a firm observance of the 
ordinances and commands of Judaism, will indeed be blessed to 
our children, even though we see not their fruit till long, long 
years after the first seeds were planted. Let us not suppose, 
because we can discern nothing in the heedlessness, the levity, the 
occasiona. faults, even the apparent indifference to spiritual 
things, in our offspring, that we have worked in vain. Let 
sorrow, let sickness come, and our children will bless Ihe parental 


PERIOD VI. — MOTHER OF HYRCANUS. 167 


love which, under God, has provided them with such hopes, such 
thoughts, that pain itself is comparatively easy to be borne, and 
sorrow is assuaged. Better, far better provide for adversity a 
hundred times, and the provision be not needed, than one case 
In which the sufferer shall need religious comfort, and in vain — 
and in bitterness of anguish exclaim, “ Why was I not taught 
to know and love God ? — why not guided in my childhood to 
that holy consolation of which I hear others speak, but which I 
cannot feel ?” How in the midst of suffering can we teach that 
God is Love ? How can the bruised and broken spirit lift up 
its thoughts to heaven, when it has, until that moment, been 
chained to earth ? If the soul, in health and joy, has not been 
taught that it has wings, wherewith, even in its earthly shell, to 
fly to heaven, how may we hope to use them when they lie 
crushed and broken beneath the heavy hand of woe ? It is vain 
to hope it ! Then, oh ! — would we do our duty to our children 
— would we indeed provide for their future — would we have 
them recall us, with the tenderest love and deepest gratitude, 
long, long after we may have passed away from earth ? — let us 
imitate the Martyr-Mother, and, clothing them for affliction as 
well as joy, nurse them from their infancy for God ; and we shall 
indeed receive them once again in mercy from His hand — and 
in His presence for everlasting. 


CHAPTER V, 

MOTHER OF JOHN HYRCANUS. WIFE OF JOHN 

HYRCANUS. ALEXANDRA. 

The victim of Antiochus was not the only instance of singular 
heroism and self-devotedness amongst the Mothers in Israel. 
Her sacrifice of all natural feelings, which we have been regard- 
ing, originated in a faithfulness and constancy to a persecuted 
faith — a resolution to dare all the torture of Earth rather than, 
by disobedience and apostasy, lose the glories of Heaven. This 
19 


108 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

was love of faith and race ; we are now to behold patriotism as 
Btrong and fervid a feeling in the woman of Israel, as in the 
women of the Gentile nations, whose deeds are trumpeted by 
fame. 

Simon, the last of the heroic Maccabaean brothers, and the 
General and High Priest of Judea, was inveigled by his son-in- 
law Ptolemy, to the fortress of Jericho, and there, at a banquet, 
assassinated. His eldest son shared his fate * and efforts were 
made in the same treacherous spirit to capture John Hyrcanus, 
Simon’s third son, at Gazara. The young man, However, 
escaped the danger, and, appearing in Jerusalem, was univer- 
sally acknowledged as the successor to his father, Prince and 
High Priest of Judea. Burning with desire to avenge the death 
of Simon, he marched with his forces instantly to Jericho. 
Ptolemy had, however, obtained possession of the mother and the 
brethren of Hyrcanus, and with his captives shut himself up in 
a strong fortress in that town. Hyrcanus instantly laid his 
plans for a close siege ; but drew back appalled as he beheld 
his mother and brothers exposed on the walls, scourged and 
tortured before his eyes, with the threat if he did not instantly 
withdraw his forces, they should be put to death. Josephus 
expressly tells us, that the force of Hyrcanus was stronger than 
Ptolemy’s, “ but he was rendered weaker by the commiseration 
he had for his mother and brethren ,” a touching proof of his filial 
affection. He knew that Ptolemy, in conjunction with Antiochus 
Sidetis, king of Syria, was seeking to overthrow Judea, and 
therefore, danger to his country as well as a father’s murder, 
called upon him to capture Ptolemy. But still he hesitated ; 
would have withdrawn, had not his heroic mother stretched oui 
her hands imploringly towards him, beseeching him to heed her 
not, but to revenge the cruel treachery done unto his father. 
Torture and death for herself and her children awaited her ; 
but still, with noble and unshrinking courage, she called on 
Hyrcanus to renew the siege. While the spirit of son and 
warrior absolutely quailed before, only witnessing the sufferings 
of his mother, the mother and the woman failed not under their 
infliction . What was her life (she probably felt), and even the 
life of her two young sons, compared with those treacherously 
slain, and with the valiant and energetic warrior who still 
remained ? Why should her sufferings so unnerve his stalwart 
arm as to tempt him to raise the siege, and so perhaps expose 


PERIOD VI. MOTHER OF HYRCANUb 169 

him to the displeasure of the people, who, though they had so 
lately made him Prince and Priest, might turn from him with a 
breath ? The wife and mother of Asmonseus, she had imbibed 
their spirit, and displayed it when most needed. Their captor 
flung indelible disgrace upon his manhood, by seeking terms 
vrith his foe, through the torture of a woman ; but fearlessly 
she scorned alike the torturer and his tortures ; she could not 
tear death, for she was a woman of Israel, whose sure and stead 
fast hope was fixed above. 

Inspired by her heroic words, Hyrcanus recommenced the 
siege with vigor, but at every fresh cruelty offered to his mother 
he appears to have relaxed; and thus, according to Josephus, 
the siege was protracted to the sabbatic year, when all offensive 
warfare was forbidden ; and in consequence, he withdrew his 
forces; but his withdrawal did not save his mother; Ptolemy 
slew both her and her sons, and fled to Philadelphia ; and his- 
tory mentions him no more. 

There is nothing in this anecdote to interest us as women, in 
a domestic point of view. The mother of Hyrcanus is brought 
before us, only as a noble-minded heroine, who cared not for 
personal suffering, so the murderer of her husband and son was 
brought to justice, and her country rid of his treacherous 
intrigues. We do not hold her up as an example to our young 
countrywomen, because we trust that they will never be exposed 
to such a trial, and we have not enough of her to know if her 
previous life were in accordance with the heroism displayed in 
peril. We must not allow admiration of greatness to usurp the 
place in our hearts due to the admiration of goodness , more 
especially as we are always cKIed upon to cultivate and display 
the latter, ard not once in a century, not one individual in a 
thousand, required to make manifest the former. Admiration 
of greatness, if too much encouraged, occasions a neglect of 
goodness ; seeking for opportunities to make manifest the one., 
we overlook the innumerable opportunities in our daily life to 
prove the other. The one lives but in excitement, the other at 
home ; and modern women must be content to exchange the 
one for the other, or their lives must be unhappy ; for in these 
matter-of-fact prosaic days, where shall we find adventures to 
make us feel and act as heroines ? 

Not to call forth romantic admiration, have we brought this 
incident forward, but simply to prove that, in time of need 


170 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

tsrael as well as every other nation had her great and noble- 
minded heroines. Qualities such as the mother of Hyrcanus 
displayed, are the offspring of freedom only. The affection, the 
reverence borne her by her son, deprived him of his wonted energy 
unnerved his heart, and bade his sword lie powerless. This 
marks the distinction between a heroine of Israel and a heroine 
of savages : even amongst the latter we may find the heroism of 
endurance, but not the filial affection, which would pause in the 
midst of a triumphant career, appalled and powerless, because a 
mother suffered. The affection of Hyrcanus is even a more con- 
vincing proof of the elevation to which the woman of Israel 
could attain, than her own fortitude ; while her address, and its 
inspiring effect, must convince us that the men of Israel dis- 
dained not to derive increase of courage and of firmness from a 
woman’s lips : and would this, could this be, if it were the man- 
date of their law to degrade and to enslave her ? 

A still more powerful proof of the perfect equality of the 
women in Israel, in the eyes of their husbands, and of all the 
people, is the curious and important fact, that more than one 
sovereign of Israel left his kingdom to his wife. Now this is a 
custom, or even an instance, found in the annals of no other 
nation, except in the Semiramis of Babylon and the Catharine 
of Russia ; and these became queens, less from the will of their 
husbands than their own successful ambition. Whereas, in 
Israel, it never appeared to excite surprise, even though the tur- 
bulence of the people or the rebellion of sons prevented the actual 
government of a queen, except in one instance. 

That the wife of John Hyrcanus should have had such a 
monster for her son as Aristobulus the First was her misfortune ; 
but his violently depriving her of the authority which his father 
had left her, does not at all interfere with the bequeathment itself, , 
or lessen the importance of the facts derived from that bequeath- 
ment. Josephus tells us, speaking of Aristobulus, and of his 
ambitious design of changing the government into a kingdom, 

“ He also cast his mother into prison, because she disputed the 
government with him ; for Hyrcanus had left her to be mistress 
of all. He also proceeded to that degree of barbarity, as to kill 
her in prison with hunger.” The extreme cruelty of his con- 
duct marks his fear of her influence, and the people’s support of 
her authority. That Hyrcanus left her to be “mistress of all” 


PERIOD VI. SAIOMI. 


171 


?ery forcibly proves the high esteem in which he must ha\ e held 
her, even if that bequeathment devolved on her an office which 
it was impossible for her sex to hold, that of High Priest. We 
are rather to suppose that he left to her judgment, which he 
had no doubt previously well proved, the choice of a successor 
for that office from amongst his sons, and the rest of the 
administration to be retained by her. Had she been unfitted 
by insufficient mental ability, for the retention of this high and 
responsible office, Aristobulus need not have proceeded to 
extremities. Whereas we read her capability, influence, and 
authority, in the awful measures which this monster of barbarity 
adopted. Far happier would it have been for her to have occu- 
pied a domestic station in Israel ; but her story is a strong con- 
firmation of all we have advanced. 

Already had the opposing factions of traditionists and anti- 
traditionists appeared in Judea. The former, under the name 
of the Pharisees, insisted that the observances which they had 
handed down to the people, though not written in the Law of 
Moses, were equally obligatory. The latter, under the cogno- 
men of Sadducees, rejected them as obligatory, and adhered only 
to the written Law. We only mention this important fact, to 
add weight to our argument, that neither traditional nor written 
Judaism could authorize the abasement of women either socially 
or domestic, as we shall find the Pharisees giving all their power- 
ful support to a female’s authority, which could hardly have 
been, if tradition forbade her to assume it. 

The death of Aristobulus, who had succeeded in changing the 
government into a kingdom, left the nation without an acknow- 
ledged head. Antigonus, the next brother to Aristobulus, had 
been murdered by his orders, and his three other brothers 
retained in prison. One might suppose that the nobility of the 
nation would at once have proceeded to action in the choice of 
a sovereign ; but we find a woman acting for them. Salome, the 
wife of Aristobulus, instead of retaining the regal dignity herself, 
which it is very evident she might have done, chose the wiser 
course of acting. We do not read of her taking counsel with 
any one ; but, entirely by her own will and pleasure, and on her 
own authority, she released her husband’s brethren from prison, 
and made Alexander Jannieus king. Her individual power and 
authority must undoubtedly have been great, or she could not 
have thus acted. Nor could she have been an ambitious woman • 


172 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


but we do not hold her forth as a good or amiable character 
bo little being reported of her ; and that little, if we are to 
believe the words of Josephus, not in her favor. Her 
independent authority and undisputed influence are all we 
need as evidences of the freedom and equality of her social 
state. 

The reign of Alexander Jannseus lasted twenty-seven year?, 
varied by foreign wars and domestic seditions. A fearful 
vengeance on his disaffected subjects in Jerusalem, however, 
produced peace ; and, for the remainder of his reign, his iron 
rule retained them in subjection. His foreign policy had been 
equally successful ; and many conquered provinces were added 
to his hereditary possessions. When, however, he was seized 
by a mortal malady, three years after his subjection of the 
insurgents, he trembled for the fate of his kingdom. A turbulent 
and angry people, and provinces so newly conquered, were 
little likely to submit to the rule of women and children. Yet 
still we do not perceive any change in his resolution, founded 
on the customs of his country, to leave his kingdom to his 
wife. 

Instead of taking counsel, we find him summoning his wife 
Alexandra to his bedside, and giving such advice as forcibly 
manifests her power to follow it. Even granting that he did 
not say the exact words which Josephus puts into his mouth, yet 
the Hebrew woman must have been quite capable of undertaking 
the solemn responsibility, and of accomplishing all he desired, 
or Josephus himself, well acquainted with the customs and 
habits of the strict Jews, would not have had the veracity of his 
narrative doubted, by giving her instructions which a fettered 
position must have entirely prevented her fulfilling. 

Fully aware of the desolate and painful position in which she 
and her children would be left by the death of her husband — - 
“ She came to him,” as Josephus says, “ weeping and lament- 
ing;” but Alexander roused himself from the stupor of his 
mortal illness to give such advice as would secure the kingdom 
to her and tranquillity to the people. He bade her conceal his 
death from his soldiers till the fortress (Ragabah, near Jordan) 
which he was besieging, had been subdued ; and then to march 
to Jerusalem in triumph, place his body in the hands of the 
Pharisees, whom he had so mortally offended during his life, to 
do with as they pleased, and promise to conduct the affairs of 


PERIOD VI. ALEXANDRA. 


173 


government under their advice and approbation. “If thou 
dost but say this to them,” Josephus makes him continue, “ I 
shall have the honor of a more glorious funeral from them than 
thou couldst have made for me ; and when it is in their power 
to abuse my dead body they will do it no injury at all, and 
thou wilt rule in safety.” 

And his wise policy was followed. That he should have 
given such to his wife must suppose a perfect conviction on his 
part that her sex would be no hindrance to its performance ; 
and that he had perfect confidence in her abilities for the task. 
Surely, then, wives in Israel must have held a very distinguished 
position ! We know that no statute in the written Law existed 
to their disadvantage ; and we must be equally sure that there 
was none in the traditions, else surely Alexander would not 
have desired his wife to throw herself upon the mercy of a set 
of men who, if tradition contained a single statute confining her 
to an inferior and powerless position, rendering her a mere 
nonentity before God and man, would have been actually 
compelled , from their own guiding laws, to deprive her of all 
authority, refuse obedience to her husband’s bequest, and drive 
her ignominiously from her inherited throne. 

The Pharisees were strict, orthodox, unyielding traditionists, 
enthusiasts, and zealots — often led on to mistaken violence by 
their excess of zeal — exposing themselves a hundred times 
during the war to increase of misery and torture from their 
unshrinking adherence to the minutest point of traditional laws. 
Yet these very men not only permit a woman to ascend the 
throne of Judea, hold the reins of government, levy troops, 
have complete dominion over her sons, who were both of suffi- 
cient age to claim the crown themselves, but actually defend 
her upon it, and, even on her death-bed, demand her counsel, 
refusing to decide themselves while she was alive, however ill 
she might be. The anti-traditionist may persist in his belief 
that the woman of Israel is degraded, and bring forward 
detached sentences from our venerable teachers wherewith to 
prove it ; but, with the history of the past so vividly before us, 
we heed them not at all. 

Alexandra appears fully to have possessed the necessary 
qualities for the cautious mode of proceeding which her husband 
advised. Her very first action proves her capable of immense 
aontrol and strong fortitude, else she could hardly have preserved 


[74 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


the secret of her husband’s death, and so pushed forward the 
siege as to succeed in conquering the fortress. She must have 
been well acquainted with the secrets of military command, of 
retaining a tumultuous soldiery in obedience: for all orders 
supposed to be sent them from their dying king, must have had 
their origin jn herself alone. Had she had advisers, the secret 
of Alexander’s death could not have been preserved, and its 
very first rumor would most probably have occasioned revolt. 
The brief notice of the historians : “ So Alexandra, when she 
had taken the fortress, &c.” “ Alexandra followed the counsels 

of her husband, &c.” “ His widow Alexandra immediately 

adopted the policy, <fec. gives but a weak idea of the painful 
and difficult position in which she was placed. 

A widow mourning for her husband with no common grief, 
for the emotions of Eastern women can scarcely be measured by 
those of the North, yet not daring either to evince her own 
natural sorrow, or give the dead its due respect ; an army with- 
out a head, dependent entirely on herself for their present 
measures to end in victory or confusion ; — a kingdom still 
quivering and brawling in civil discord, ripe for insurrection, 
enraged with their monarch, yet standing in such awe of his 
terrible severity that, as long as they believed him still living, 
all thought of active rebellion was paralysed; — this was no 
enviable position for a feeble woman, even though her fortitude 
and talents were adequate to the emergency. Hid the secret 
of his death transpire before she could obtain the ear of the 
Pharisees, she knew that the flame of civil dissension would 
light up from one end of Judea to the other ; and who might 
prophesy the end ? 

Nobly she must have averted this evil. The soldiers of 
Israel were not unaccustomed to female heroism. The chroni- 
cles of their ancestors told them of a Deborah, of the female 
savior of the citizens of Tekoah, of Abigail, of Esther, and in 
later times, of the martyr mother and the noble wife of Simon ; 
and therefore, that a woman should mingle in their ranks, and 
urge them on to victory, was no matter of astonishment. The 
fortress was gained, and a triumphant march brought them to 
Jerusalem, accompanied as they still believed by their dying 
king. 

What then must have been their surprise, when, summoning 
the heads of the Pharisees, Alexandra committed into their 


PERIOD VI. ALEXANDRA. 


175 


keeping the dead body of the king, and the soldiers learned 
that it was no commands of a warrior, but a woman’s self who 
had thus led them on to victory. This action alone would 
have dazzled the eyes of the multitude, ever eager for excite- 
ment; and united as it was with the popular measure of 
bringing the Pharisees into power and favor, and re-establishing 
the traditional forms and practices which had been abolished by 
John Hyrcanus and his sons, but which were greatly endeared 
to the people, secured her their love yet more. Her giving the 
body of her husband to his bitterest enemies, was hailed as a 
proof that she had never approved of his conduct, a.id a very 
brief interval fixed her securely on her throne. 

But though great authority was thus lodged in the hands of 
the Pharisees, the Queen was evidently a free agent in indi- 
vidual administration. She made her elder son Hyrcanus high 
priest, as a matter of course. Fortunately for the peace of the 
kingdom, his indolent character prevented his meddling with 
the politics of the day ; high priesthood and kingdom owned 
the same acquiescence with the measures of the Pharisees : but, 
while Hyrcanus permitted himself to be a passive agent in their 
hands, his more energetic and enterprising mother pursued her 
own active and independent course. Instead of sinking into a 
mere shadow of a sovereign, because her domestic government 
was so circumscribed, she newly organized and increased the 
power of her armies by levying large bodies of mercenary 
troops, and striking terror into the hearts of all the surrounding 
nations. Hostages were demanded and sent; so that the 
depredations and petty warfare which had so often harassed the 
borders of Judea in the reign of Alexander, were effectually 
prevented, and the whole land was at peace. In all these 
foreign affairs, Alexandra acted alone. The Pharisees were 
much too busily employed in their home administration, and in 
their desire to obtain summary vengeance for all the insults 
which their body had received in the previous reign. More 
especially they demanded justice on those who had assisted in 
the massacre of the eight hundred men who had fallen victims 
to the severe vengeance of Alexander four years previous. 
Aristobulus, the queen’s second son, who had long felt with 
secret indignation his exclusion from all power, seized the 
opportunity to put himself at the head of the oppressed party ; 
and, seeking the presence of the Queen, appealed, not to her 


176 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


mercy alone, but to her justice, reproaching her with “ ingrati 
tude in thus abandoning the faithful adherents of her husband 
to the vengeance of their enemies.” 

It was a difficult position for the queen, thus appealed to by 
both parties ; but her extraordinary sagacity triumphed even 
over this. She saved them from the wrath of their enemies by 
permitting them to leave Jerusalem, enrolling them in the 
garrisons of the frontier cities, and gave Aristobulus, whose 
restless intrigues were likely to endanger the peace she had so 
labored to attain, the command of a large army, nominally to 
check the depredations of the petty prince of Chalcis, but 
secretly to obtain possession of Damascus. The prince was 
successful in accomplishing both his mother’s object and his 
own. Damascus was taken,* and the army, a very considerable 
one, was won over and strongly united to his personal interests. 

Alexandra reigned nine years, a breathing time of peace for 
her distracted country, which only waited for her death to plunge 
again into all the miseries of civil discord, the issue of which 
was complete subjection to the power of Rome. The advice of 
Alexander regarding the Pharisees certainly aided the domestic 
peace which lasted during the government of his wife ; but a 
less enlightened, less energetic sovereign, could not have so 
triumphed over the difficulties of the age. There is no little 
wisdom in knowing when and how to submit when submission 
is required, and yet in so retaining individual dignity and self- 
respect, that the station we occupy may continue its proper 
elevation in the minds of common men, who so often pay to 
state the homage they refuse to worth. Alexandra was more 
truly beloved and venerated by the multitude, than any of the 
sovereigns who preceded or succeeded her ; and this would not 
have been had she succumbed to the power of any party. She 
allowed the political administration to be carried on by the 
favorites of the people ; but she was no idle cypher in their 
hands. She kept peace between the adverse bands by a 
measure which no weak or fearful disposition could have 
counselled. She guarded her kingdom from all foreign 
aggressions ; and her people, both in her capital and in the 

* According to Milman : Josephus says he did nothing considerable 
at Damascus; but, from the issue, we incline towards the opinion ol 
Milman. 


PERIOD VI. ALEXANDRA. 17^ 

provinces, were prosperous and happy. Even the turbulent and 
ambitious spirit of her younger son did not dare display itself 
during the government of his mother ; though, the very hour 
that the dangerous nature of her illness was rumored, he stole 
away from Jerusalem, unknown to all save his wife, to visit 
alternately the fortresses of his friends, and so secure their 
subjection and allegiance to himself. 

Ill, and suffering from a mortal disease, the flight of Aristo- 
bulus at first occasioned the queen little uneasiness ; but, when 
many messengers came with the tidings that fortress after 
fortress had submitted to the prince, and he was, in fact, lord of 
almost all the strongholds of the country, his design became 
apparent both to the Queen and to the Nation. The latter, 
or more properly speaking, the immediate followers of the Pha- 
risaic administration, were struck with consternation, fearing the 
vengeance of Aristobulus for the insults offered both to his fol- 
lowers and house. From a careful consideration of the Queen’s 
conduct, and reply to the nobles and Hyrcanus, when they 
sought her on her death-bed, and demanded her final counsel, it 
appears to me that her own affections and wishes sided with her 
younger son. She must have intimately known the character 
of both. Her own experience had taught her that energy, firm- 
ness, activity, were all imperatively needed to secure the peace 
and prosperity of the kingdom, and to preserve the popular 
party at its proper distance from the throne. In these qualities 
she must have long known Hyrcanus was greatly deficient. His 
extreme inertness had been of little importance when merely 
High Priest ; but would subject both himself and his people to 
the dominion of a party the moment he ascended the throne. 
Yet he was the elder, and was rightful heir. Aristobulus, it is 
true, had all the qualities necessaiy for a monarch of Judea 
at that period ; but he was not the heir according to seniority, 
and he was the known enemy to that party whose influence 
with the factious multitude had so long aided in preserving 
peace. To nominate Aristobulus was to wrong her first-born, 
and plunge the kingdom into civil discord with her dying 
breath. To nominate Hyrcanus, was to behold the same 
evils, only at a greater distance ; and in such a painful position, 
alike as a mother and a sovereign, her answer to the nobles was 
a wise one. They had demanded her counsel as to the present 
posture of affairs; for that, in effect, Aristobulu's was lord 


178 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL, 


of almost all the kingdom, and that it was useless and absurd 
for them to take counsel by themselves, while she was yet alive, 
how ill soever she might be ; — words somewhat convincing how 
completely Alexandra had contrived to retain her own authority. 
Here are the elders of the Nation, men grey in years and wis- 
dom, acknowledging and obeying both scriptural and tradi- 
tional laws, coming to a weak and dying woman, and demand- 
ing her counsel as their sole guidance in a dangerous emer- 
gency. What would this prove regarding the social position 
and mental education of the Hebrew women ? 

But with death and eternity so near, what had the Queen of 
•Judea further to do with life and time ? How could the 
mother’s heart, lingering with both her sons, wrong one at 
the expense of the other ? How could the amiable and peace- 
loving sovereign send forth from her death-bed, such decrees as 
would wring tears of blood ? Yet, how appear before her 
Maker, if her last words breathed such advice as her heart 
denied ? It could not be, and therefore, “ she bade them 
do what they thought proper to be done — for they had many 
circumstances still in their favor ; a nation in good heart, 
an army, and money in their several treasuries. For herself, 
she had small concern about public affairs, now, when the 
strength of mind and body had already failed.” 

Surely, these were not the dying words of either an 
ambitious or an intriguing woman, but simply of one glad 
to lay down the toils and cares of government, and seek 
that immortal peace and blessedness, which, as a woman of 
Israel, she knew awaited her above. She died soon afterwards, 
at the age of seventy-three. She must, therefore, have been 
sixty-four w'hen she first ascended the throne, an age which 
ought to increase our admiration of the courage and energy 
which she then displayed. We can imagine a young woman, or 
one even in the prime of life, nerving herself for such a difficult 
task as the concealing a husband’s death, and carrying on 
a military enterprise with such skill that conquest followed ; but 
to a woman of sixty-four, from whom all the glow, the romance 
of life, we imagine, has faded, the task must have been more diffi 
cult still. 

It proves that her youth had been one of energy, intellect, 
and active usefulness, or age could not have thus displayed 
them That she had been accustomed to receive the confidence 


PERIOD VI. ALEXANDRA. 


179 


23 well a? the affection of her husband ; that he had associated 
her in his civil and military government, by confiding in liei 
bosom all his designs, else it would have been impossible 
for her at the age of sixty-four to claim, and to retain monarchi- 
cal power. The people must have known and loved her as 
a wife iu Israel, or in her unprotected widowhood they would 
never have accepted her as their queen. Her sons must have 
been taught her superiority in rank to themselves ; been accus- 
tomed from boyhood to regard her, if she survived, as the suc- 
cessor to their father before themselves, or they would have dis- 
puted her authority; the law and traditions must both have 
permitted the sovereign power to rest in the hands of a female, 
or all Israel would have risen up against it. 

We are not now considering the subject in its political bearings 
as to whether such a system of monarchical succession be 
a wise one or not ; but simply in a national view, as it marks 
the condition of woman in Israel, even at a period when national 
sin and civil bloodshed were desecrating the Holy Land of the 
Eternal, and the pure beautiful spirit of his Holy Law was con- 
cealed beneath the tempest clouds of bigotry and superstition on 
the one side, and of laxity and indifference on the other. Yet 
still, through the infinite mercy of God, shining forth upon some 
faithful hearts in the ranks of both. 

The summing up of Alexandra’s character and administra- 
tion by Josephus, is one of the most extraordinary specimens 
of historical contradiction man ever compiled ; we subjoin it in 
a note* for the perusal of our readers, assuring them that if they 

* “ A woman she was, who showed no signs of the weakness of her 
sex, for she was sagacious to the greatest degree in her ambition of 
governing.” So far, leaving out ambition, he is correct, but here follows 
a most incomprehensible sentence : “ She demonstrated by her doings at 
once, that her mind was fit for action ; and that sometimes men them- 
selves show the little understanding they have, by the frequent mistakes 
they make in forms of government ; for she always preferred the present 
to futurity, and preferred the power of an imperious dominion of all 
things; and in comparison of that, had no regard to what was good, or 
what was right. However, she brought the affairs of her house to such 
an unfortunate condition, that she was the occasion of the taking away 
that authority from it ; and that in no long time afterward, which she had 
obtained by a vast number of hazards and misfortunes. [What were 
they? Her husband’s will !] And this out of a desire which does not 
belong to woman, and all by her compliance with those who bare ill-wdi 
to her family and by leaving the administration destitute of a proper su,-* 


180 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


can come to a satisfactory conclusion as to its real meaning, w€ 
shall feel really obliged to them, if they will impart it for our 
especial benefit. Meanwhile, we will take leave, very humbly, 
to differ from the reverend historian, and regard her reign and 
character in a light which strikes us as doing the most justice 
to its subject. In the first place, Josephus talks of her “ambi- 
tion of governing,” her obtaining the crown through hazards 
and misfortunes, and all out of a desire which does not belong 
to a woman ; and w r e can discover nothing of the kind. She 
came to her husband weeping and lamenting the desolation 
which would be hers on his death. Surely if she had ambition 
(a desire which we quite agree with Josephus does not belong 
to a woman), then was the time to display it, and urge -ier hus- 
band to take measures for her succession. She was not the first 
wife to whom the crown had been left, though the only one per- 
mitted to reign ; but that there was a precedent in the annals 
of her country, permitted her surely to regard her right to the 
throne merely as a matter of course. Then, again, the “ hazards 
and misfortunes,” which he tells us she risked to gratify her 
desire of imperious dominion, what were they? Simple and 
exact obedience to a husband’s dying counsel, his will confirmed, 
and her accession not even disputed, or occasioning a dissent- 
ing murmur. We can discover no trace whatever of her 
neglecting the “right” and “good” to increase a despotic 
power; and we rather think Josephus himself would find it 
difficult to prove it from his own account of her. Her prefer- 
ring present peace and prosperity, and seeking to confirm such 
blessings to her people, surely cannot be deemed a fault ; and 
how the miseries that followed her death can be imputed to her, 
as the historian so sapiently seeks to prove, passes our poor 
comprehension. Let us suppose a moment that she had not 
succeeded her husband, and the crown had descended, as in 
the right line of succession it must, to Hyrcanus, Alexander’s 
elder son. What would have followed ? exactly the same evils 
an took place after Alexandra’s death ; the quarrels of the 

port of great men and indeed, her management during her administra- 
tion, while yet alive, was such as filled the palace after her death with 
calamities and disturbances. However, though this had been her man- 
ner of governing, she preserved the nation in peace" Most extraordi- 
nary how she could, if so many errors of character and government could 
be laid to her charge 5- — 6ee Josephus, vol. ii. p. 397. 


PERIOD VI. ALEXANDRA. 


181 


brot hers, each supported by a powerful party, and final appeal 
and subjection to Home. The national sins and departure from 
the Eternal, by amalgamation with foreign powers, were rapidly 
advancing, Israel was hurrying forward his own fearful destiny 
in exact accordance with the prophecies of God. He was 
not only sinning against God sins by which no one was injured 
but himself ; but darkly, fearfully, terribly against his brother 
man. The sins of Aristobulus the first, against his mother and 
brother, were, unhappily, neither without precedent nor repeti- 
tion. They were but the preface to others quite as horrible and 
more extended. The nation was rapidly approaching that fear- 
ful state pictured by the prophet when the Lord bade him, 
“ Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy 
and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, hear with their 
ears, and understand with their hearts, and convert and be 
healed ;” meaning, that the sins of the people were such, that 
they had turned away the mercy of God from them; and, 
refusing to bestow on them the softening spirit of repentance 
and amendment, because they neither prayed for nor sought it, 
he left them to their own impenitent and sinful inclinations ; 
and, in consequence, they hurried on their own awful destiny — 
the destruction of their Temple and city, the desolation of their 
land, and their dispersion over the whole world. And this fear- 
ful state of things had already commenced. The reign of 
Alexandra, instead of her mal-administration, causing the 
“ calamities and disturbances” of which Josephus so unjustly 
accuses her, actually averted the tempest for nine years. The 
Bible gives us more than one instance of the judgment of the 
Lord being turned aside for a certain period, even though it may 
not eventually be averted. The reign of Alexandra appears to 
us one of these breathing times ; obtained History tells us not 
how ; but (reasoning, as the earnest study of God’s holy Word 
would bid us reason) it was permitted through His infinite 
mercy from the intercession of those few noble and trusting 
hearts, still faithful to Himself. How know we that Alexandra 
herself might not have been one of these? The scanty and 
contradictory records of the time will not permit our upholding 
such an idea as proven truth ; but it is more accordant with the 
history of her administration and its issue than the charge of 
Josephus, “ that the miseries which followed were attributable to 
her.” Where were the great men whose assistance, we are to 


182 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL, 


suppose from Josephus, she neglected? In placing part of the 
home administration in the hands of those who had borne ill- 
will to her family, we can simply trace the loving obedience of 
a faithful wife to her husband’s dying counsel ; and her own 
anxious desire to secure the welfare of her people, even by the 
sacrifice of her prejudices. Surely such a course of acting is the 
wisdom of a sovereign. The conquest of our own prejudices, 
the acting exactly contrary to one’s own will, is not less difficult 
for a monarch than for ourselves; nor less meritorious when 
achieved. Why then refuse her the admiration which, in this 
instance, is certainly her due ? Yet, with all this unjust cen- 
sure, and charges which have no solid foundation, Josephus 
allows, “ that she showed no weakness of her sex, was sagacious 
in the greatest degree in the power of governing, and preserved 
the nation in peace.” Now how could she possibly be sagacious 
in the power of governing, if her mal-administration were the 
cause of all her country’s after misery ? How could she have 
neglected all that was right and good if, in such fearful times, 
she had yet preserved the nation in peace ? a measure which no 
male sovereign had yet been able to accomplish. Surely we 
must all feel that such contradictory assertions are of very little 
worth ? and our best means of coming to a just conclusion is to 
ponder, not on what followed or came before, but simply on 
what she did, and on the age in which she lived . 

To our own feelings, tinctured perhaps as they are with 
national warmth, Alexandra appears far more worthy to occupy 
a place in the annals of female sovereigns, than many who have 
found eager hearts and talented pens, to bring them forward 
She achieved no great victories, it is true — she enlarged not the 
boundaries of her kingdom. We read of no dazzling connexions 
with foreign potentates, which, though throwing a lustre over the 
pages of history, were incompatible with that obedience to the 
Law which was to make Judea a land “ holy unto the Lord.” 
Like a true woman, on whom the calm, sober wisdom of matur- 
ity has descended, she preferred peace to conquest ; and she 
obtained it. 

It is an idle sophistry to attempt lessening the dignity and 
film ness of her character, by the assertion, that the peace of the 
kingdom was owing to the supreme power having been placed 
in the hands of the Pharisees. Her wisdom manifested itself in 
the very bestowal of this power, and in yet so retaining her own 


PERIOD VI. ALEXANDRA. 


183 


independence as to be in power, as well as in name, the head of 
the state — in so acting, so counselling, that the Pharisees must 
have felt that all they did, though in strict accordance with thei* 
own sentiments, was in reality mere obedience to their sovereign 
This consciousness it must have been, which compelled theii 
appeal to her on her death-bed. “ It was absurd for them tc 
take counsel by themselves while she was yet alive.” Are these 
the words of men in whose hands was the whole power of the 
kingdom, so that the regal dignity was a mere cypher ? No — 
though it was a woman who swayed the Jewish sceptre, a woman 
who sat upon the Jewish throne, and placed thereby the suffra- 
ges of a whole nation, obeying and acknowledging tradition as 
well as scripture — the sovereign dignity was never more iiobly 
held. Man could scarcely have so triumphed over the age. 
His desire for absolute power, his ambition, restlessness, and his 
ungovernable pride, all would have made him regard concession as 
humiliation. The delicate manoeuvres of leading, when the most 
trifling error would bring disaster — of commanding and enforc- 
ing obedience when we must otherwise obey — of retaining in 
subjection wills which the weight of a feather may turn to the over- 
balancing our own — these are politics too delicate for man, and 
not attainable to ordinary women. 

But Alexandra was no ordinary woman. She united the mas- 
culine energy, the grasping intellect of man, to the delicate tact 
of her own sex ; and, by the combination, exalted her sovereign 
power, and so triumphed over the difficulties of the age, that 
well is she deserving of the love and veneration of her descend- 
ants, — well worthy of her own glorious descent. 

It is greatly to be regretted, that in the records of historical 
personages, so little is given us of their domestic life. Too often 
history, though accurate, is the mere surface of things, and 
Truth we are told lies at the bottom of a well, not on its frothy 
surface. We ought, therefore, to accustom ourselves to search 
deeply for it, not to be content with receiving it merely second 
hand. Now, Truth is often elicited, by using not only our intel- 
lectual but our imaginative capacities. The first permits us to 
examine and compare ; to reflect and condense ; and to exclude 
the peculiar prejudices of the author whom we read, and looking 
steadily on the bare fact, trace its causes and its end. And yet 
we shall not find this exercise of the intellect or reflective power, 
perfectly satisfactory, unless we can combine and unite all those 


184 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

distinct and separate thoughts into one perfect whole by the 
Dower of imagination, or creation. We are aware that imagi- 
nation has been called a dangerous gift, as leading to folly and 
romance. Unite it with religion and intellect, reason and 
truth, and bless God for its bestowal, either on your children 
or yourselves ! It will penetrate the imperfect records of the 
past. It will look calmly on the contending storms and dark 
pictures of the present, for through them it will trace the same 
calmly guiding hand, working the progression of mank'nd, 
to be visible only when the present becomes the past ; and 
piercing the impenetrable folds of the future, become almost a 
prophet in its pure faith of things which will be, human and 
divine. But deprive imagination of these glorious guardians — 
Religion, Intellect, Reason, and Truth — and then, indeed, exor- 
cise it as you would a fiend ! 

Now, though history tells us nothing of Alexandra’s domestic 
character, the exercise of Reason and Imagination may fill up 
the vacuum, and give us the information that we need. Let it 
be remembered, she w r as sixty-four when called upon to occupy 
a public station. Would her sons have submitted to her 
authority, even if the customs of the country authorized her suc- 
cession, unless accustomed to that reverence and obedience, 
which, if rendered to and deserved by a mother in Israel, as the 
law of God commanded, might easily be transferred from a 
mother to a sovereign ? Josephus puts words in the mouth of 
Aristobulus which, as they are in direct contradiction to the wall 
of his father, we do not believe he ever said ; or if he did, it is 
proved they were the mere impulse of momentary passion, by 
their having no effect in turning even his own party from their 
allegiance.* Had it been mere ambition which placed his mother 
on the throne, as he dared to charge her, his was not the spirit 
to have submitted quietly. No ; in the very postponement of 
his restless intrigues till her death, we read what power she must 
have exercised over him, both as his mother and his sovereign. 

As there is no mention of Alexandra during the lifetime of 
her husband, the qualities she afterwards displayed must all 
have been cherished, cultivated, exercised in her domestic sphere ; 
and in the respective duties of wife and mother. To the women 
in Israel was always intrusted the solemn responsibility of the 


Josephus’ Histor Antiq., book xiii. chap. 14. 


PERIOD VI. ALEXANDRA. 


185 


education of men. We Lave already expressed our own convic 
>ion that mothers were associated with the fathers in the religious 
instruction of their sons (see 2d Period, chap. ii. p. 155) ; 
and innumerable precepts, in the valuable writings of our vene- 
rable fathers,* confirm this so strongly that no doubts can be 
entertained of their individual and social capabilities for the task ; 
or of the consideration and reverence in which, as the accomplish- 
es of such a mission, they must have been regarded by their 
countrymen. Again, we repeat, we are no longer writing of 
Bible times ; but of Judaism nearing the advent of Christianity 
— that very epoch when it is stated that Judaism had so fallen 
from the institution of the Eternal, that it was to pass away from 
Earth and give place to a new and reforming creed. With 
regard to woman’s position we see this charge is wholly fa’se. 
The writers of the Talmud wrote of woman, her solemn mission, 
duties, and responsibilities, as the law of God commanded, and 
as they witnessed. And how could the education of the men 
of Israel have been intrusted to her, had she not been 
universally, and from the very first, recognised as mentally and 
spiritually on a perfect equality with man ? 

Having received their education, not only as boys, but in 
early manhood, from their mother, it was far more natural that 
Hyrcanus and Aristobulus should quietly yield allegiance to her 
as their sovereign, than by demanding the regal authority 
during her lifetime, sink her to a lower grade, and compel her 
submission to themselves. The exquisite beauty of the laws of 
Israel, guiding the conduct of children to their parents, would 
have been insulted by such proceedings. We can scarcely fail 
to be struck by their practical illustration of the law in the very 
customs of the country, that the wife of a deceased sovereign 
should reign before his sons. If she could educate them for the 
duties of a sovereign, she was certainly capable of governing in 
her own person ; and this, then, reveals the secret of her wise 
administration. Whether or not a wife should outlive her hus- 
band could only be known to God. The minds of the 
daughters and wives of royalty could never be cultivated only 
in the expectation of succeeding to the throne. No such 

* For this and other allusions henceforward to the Talmudic writings, 
the author is indebted to the valuable and kindly imparted information of 
a gentleman well known by the initials T. T. 


L 86 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


ambition could have tarnished the lustre of the studies they 
pursued, or the acquirements they attained. They studied, 
thought, practised, tnat example as well as precept might aid 
them in their glorious task. Not for their own spiritual and 
temporal aggrandizement, but for their sons. In Israel it was 
not enough for mothers simply to give birth to men : it was 
theirs to train and to create them ! How different, how gloriously 
snperior to the system of a contemporary nation,* where the boy 
was taken from his mother’s arms at the tender age of seven, 
and deemed effeminate and weak if he ever sought her com- 
pany again ! 

Minds accustomed to such exercise (for the education of men 
could be no light and merely feminine task), were of course 
capable of individual energy and exertion when called upon to 
make such qualities manifest. Alexandra had exerted energy 
too long and nobly in her domestic and maternal duties, during 
her youth, for it to desert her in her age. There was no need 
for preparation to perform the monarchical duties ; for, in pre- 
paring her sons for such destiny, she had prepared herself. 
That her sons did not reflect back her noble qualities, and failed 
alike in the unambitious patriotism and anxiety for her people's 
happiness which she so earnestly displayed, cannot and may not 
be traced to a defect in education. Very seldom is it that a 
mother’s anxious work is so rewarded that her sons are exactly 
what she has prayed and striven that they should be. It is not 
the fault of the trainer but of the trained ; the assumption of 
individual character, the budding forth of individual sin, which 
not the tenderest, the most careful education can ever entirely 
disperse. It will do much, very much ; and, though it may not 
expect always to be rewarded upon earth, it is never wholly use- 
less. How know we what the evil might have been, had we 
not sought at least in part to subdue it ? The characters of 
Ilyrcanus and Aristobulus might have been very different had 
they lived in other times ; but, in a period of such terrible social 
iniquity, the forbearance practised by Aristobulus alike towards 
his mother and brother in her lifetime, is sufficient confirmation 
that, however she may have failed in making them all she 
wished for their country, she had at least impressed them with 
the strongest reverence and submission towards herself. In 


* Spana. 


PERIOD VI. MARIAMNE. 


187 


happier times the character of both brothers might have shone 
forth with untarnished lustre ; as it was, they mingled with and 
were lost in the fearful vortex of the age. The nation was 
hastening on its own annihilation, and their unfortunate dis- 
pute, and its consequent reference to Pompey, hurried on the 
and. 

We have lingered on the character of Alexandra, because it 
is a most important one, as concerns us nationally ; although, 
perhaps, as women in general, we may derive less instruction 
from it than from others. The characters cf history, however, 
cannot be to us like the characters of the Bible. We are no 
longer perusing inspired records, where example as well as 
precept can breathe the voice of God. Our aim now can be 
only a national one. To throw together every notice of the 
Hebrew women our history will present, which will prove their 
social and domestic positions, their mental capabilities, their 
responsibilities : all which will convince us that ancient and 
modern Judaism is the same. There is not the division which 
the caviller or the ignorant have raised up between them. Let 
us not then be charged with a change in our style and subject 
if the present notices read more like historical memoirs than the 
home-speaking essays of the characters of Scripture. We 
leave to our Seventh and last period the conclusions to which 
the history of our Sixth will lead us — the moral and religious 
lesson which, even from History and its imperfectly' sketched 
personages, may still be learned. Even did it give us no other 
mention of woman than the wife of Jannaeus, we should possess 
enough to satisfy us, that we need no other than our own 
religion for our earthly elevation and our spiritual hope. 


CHAPTER VI. 

MARIAMNE. 

The Idumaean dynasty was on the ascendant, the Asmonffifui 
yn the decline ; yet the people still turned to the remaining 


188 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


scions of their native princes, with such constancy and affection, 
that Herod, though politically triumphant, felt that his claim to 
Judea would not be recognised by the multitudes, unless he 
associated with him one whose pure Asmonaean blood, enhanced 
by her engaging youth and extraordinary beauty, would win 
for him yet more strongly than his own power, the suffrages of 
the whole people of Judea. 

In the person of the hapless Mariamne was represented, not 
the Asmonaean line alone, but the claims of both brothers, 
Hyrcanus and Aristobulus. Alexander, the son of the latter, 
married Alexandra, the daughter of the former: and their 
children, in consequence, inherited the claims and right of both. 
But this was no longer the age for legal succession, or the 
recognition of native sovereigns. The people indeed still clung 
to the laws and prejudices of their fathers ; and still loved the 
descendants of those valiant men who had once saved them 
from oppression — but Judea was no longer a kingdom — the 
Jews no longer a people. The divisions between brother and 
brother had opened a path to the all-conquering Romans. The 
line of David, in whom alone the promised monarchy could be 
restored, had long since passed away : and in this period of 
Jewish history, between the return from Babylon and the final 
captivity, we can but trace the gradual yet certain advancement 
in national iniquity, prophesied by Moses and every other ulterior 
prophet ; when, notwithstanding the faithful obedience, spirit- 
uality, and love of individuals (ten, perhaps, in every thousand), 
God could not withdraw His avenging arm — leaving to that 
other and brighter world, in His presence, to distinguish 
“ between the righteous and the wicked, between him that 
serveth God, and him that serveth Him not.” 

The most powerful impetus to this progression in iniquity, 
originated in too close a connexion, and too blind an attachment 
in Hyrcanus, for Antipater, an Idumsean by birth, and a Jew 
by adoption and semblance. Idumsea had only lately been 
united to Judea, and its inhabitants, by the representation of 
John Hyrcanus the first, won over as proselytes to Judaism. 
The family of Antipater, therefore, were not Hebrews. Herod, 
entitled the last king of the Jews, had no national right to the 
title : for he was a stranger and, by his actions, a very doubtful 
proselyte. There was, indeed, evil enough in Israel before the 
ascendency of the Idumsean family ; but not that utter disregard 


PERIOD VI. — MARIAMNE. 


189 


so nationality, that complete blending with Rome, that intimate 
association and adoption of its peculiar characteristics, as in the 
reign of Herod ; whose insidious policy to lessen Jewish nation- 
ality — that no allegiance to the King of Heaven might interfere 
with the acknowledgment of his kingdom upon earth — opened 
the wide gate of utter destruction for his hapless people. The 
web of misery flung by Vespasian and Titus over the miserable 
Jews, Herod’s own hand originally wove. 

The gallant son of Aristobulus, Alexander, had been murdered ; 
and his widow and orphan children found protection with the 
powerful friend of Hyrcanus, the Idumsean Herod ; whose father, 
Antipater, had fallen a victim to the hatred of the Jewish faction. 
Herod appears to have regarded Alexandra and her children 
only as the near relations of Hyrcanus, whose party he always 
pretended to befriend. As the widow and children of Alexander, 
the son of Aristobulus, whose claims and struggles for independent 
sovereignty the Id um leans had always so powerfully and persever- 
ingly resisted, we might suppose they would be objects rather of 
enmity than of protection. Affection for the person, and gratitude 
for the favors of Hyrcanus, there could have been none in the 
hearts of either Antipater or Herod ; they supported him simply 
because his indolent and confiding disposition placed all the 
actual power in their hands. With Aristobulus they knew this 
could not be; for he was, according to Josephus, “an active 
man, and one of a great and generous soul and the only 
means to increase their own power, they felt, was to decrease his. 
When, however, Aristobulus and Alexander were both murdered, 
and the sole representative of that younger Asmonsean branch 
(except the children of Alexander) was Antigonus, who, notwith- 
standing his casual bravery and occasional success, appears to 
have possessed but little of the Asmonsean spirit, it became an 
act of policy to unite himself with the youthful representatives 
of both the brothers ; — and Herod acted accordingly. 

Mariamne could not have been, at this time, much above 
fourteen or fifteen years old, that is, granting she was the senior 
of her brother Aristobulus, who, four years afterwards, is said 
to have only just completed his seventeenth year. The fierce 
and jealous passion which afterwards characterized Herod 
towards his young wife, does not appear to have been excited 
at the time of their betrothal. He might have been attracted 
oy her exceeding beauty ; but the character of the man allow? 


190 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


the supposition, that at that period, when all his ambition was 
to aggrandize and secure his own power for the future, as well 
as for the present, he would equally have made this connexion 
had the grand-daughter of Aristobulus and Hyrcanus been as 
ugly as sin, instead of lovely as virtue and innocence could make 
her. Happy indeed would it have been for her, had she not 
been thus lovely, and the connexion remained one of policy 
alone ! 

At the time of their betrothal, Mariamne knew little of Herod, 
save as one of the most gallant, most enterprising men of the 
day. She had been educated in perfect seclusion with her 
brother ; kept apart, as much as possible, from the fearful 
confusions and crimes of the state ; and though she had not as 
yet been called upon to put away the thoughts and habits of 
youth, and come forward in all the early maturity of Eastern 
womanhood, — still it is not unlikely that she was willing and 
contented to receive Herod as her destined husband. He could 
be as winning, as attractive, and as gentle, as he could also be 
terrible in severity and rage. We read enough of his taste for 
the arts, his expansive intellect, the magnificent scale of his 
architectural, and other civil improvements, to believe that he 
was not solely the monster of passion and cruelty which his 
later deeds pronounce him. His very intercourse with the 
luxurious Romans may have added a manly polish and graceful 
manner to the stern reserve of a Jewish warrior ; and these were 
not qualities to pass unnoticed in that day. Mariamne supposed 
him the friend and protector of her grandfather and mother ; 
and if he did seek at that time to win her affections, it was most 
likely she could bestow them willingly, and without repugnance 
consider herself as his bride. 

They were not, however, then together long enough, for that 
scarcely conscious preference to become real affection. 

Awakened to a closely threatening danger, Herod fled with 
his family, including Mariamne as his bride, her mother, and 
brother to Masada, a strong fortress on the western shores of 
the Dead Sea, and near his paternal heritage, Idumaea. The 
journey was fatiguing, and so dangerous that Herod, in despair, 
had nearly attempted his own life; but his temporal good 
fortune did not desert him : he reached the fortress In safety, 
and was speedily reinforced by 800 native troops from Idumaea, 
unicr the command of his brother Joseph. This is the first 


PERIOE VI. MARIAMNE. 


1 91 


mention history gives of Mariamne. Antigonus, whose con 
nexion with the Parthians occasioned this sudden flight, never 
appeared to remember even the existence of his brother’s 
children ; and however the intriguing and ambitious Alexandra 
might have secretly hated the power of her son-in-law Herod, 
there was no eluding it, save by making it her own. 

Four years elapsed ere Mariamne became the wife of Herod, 
and during that period her domestic life must have been far 
from happy. In fact, from her first connexion with Herod, we 
may say her sorrows began ; for their rapid flight to Masada, 
pursued so closely by the Parthian allies of Antigonus as repeat- 
edly to meet in deadly fight, and encounter such dangers that 
Herod’s own spirit quailed almost to despair, could have been 
but an interval of fearful terror, fatigue, and suffering to the 
young girl only just commencing life. If her affections had 
indeed been excited by Herod, the length of his absence, the 
dangers to whieh he was exposed, all must have weighed 
depressingly on a mind too young by many years for such 
heavy cares. 

Alexandra and her children were not the only companions of 
Herod’s hasty flight. He took with him his own mother 
Cypros, and his sister Salome ; and it was at Masada, in conse- 
quence, that that fearful enmity between the female members of 
his family commenced, which was to dash his whole domestic 
life with woe. The extreme youth and purity of Mariamne 
permits us the supposition, that, at the time, she herself had 
little to do with the bickerings and petty provocations conti- 
nually passing before her. But her position was a painful and 
a dangerous one ; she had not one female friend who could be 
the guardian and guide which her youth and beauty so much 
needed. The character of her mother, as we see it afterwards 
revealed, was far more likely to infuse its own baleful influences 
within the young mind and heart, in such perfect innocence 
looking up to her, than to strengthen and ennoble Mariamne ? s 
natural high qualities. Yet, how was her child to discover 
this ? How mistrust, and so turn from her only parent, nay, 
with the sole exception of her young brother, her only relative 
upon earth ? Alexandra had intellect, policy, and wisdom, 
crooked as it was ; and the reverence and love uniting the sons 
and daughters of Israel with their parents, must effectually have 
prevented Mariamne, at her tender age, from discovering aughf 
20 


192 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


which could frighten her from her mother’s guardianship. How 
could she doubt the purity of her mother’s love? How divide 
the true from the false ? the judicious from the wary ? A judi- 
cious parent would have taught and practised moderation and 
forbearance ; would, if she had seen the necessity of uniting 
the pure high Asmonaean race with the degraded Idumajan, 
have bent at least to the necessity, and conciliated the family 
of her daughter’s husband herself, and led her child to do so 
too. ' But this, to a character such as Alexandra, was impossi- 
ble ; her very subtlety in this instance succumbed to her over- 
bearing pride. The pure and beautiful spirit, which, guiding 
the law of Moses, inspired the prophet to promise, in the name 
of the Lord, a place dearer than sons and daughters to the 
strangers who, turning from idolatry to Him, kept his covenants 
and sabbaths, had been lost in the dense cloud of sin and misery 
enveloping Judea. Pride had folded up the Jewish heart, 
instead of the lucid robe of charity, which the law commanded 
and infused j and from the insufferable haughtiness of Alexandra, 
we may trace all the misery which ended not even with the 
murder of her child. 

To any disposition, the pride and haughty insolence of 
another occasion a bitterness of feeling, a desire of retaliation, only 
to be conquered by a consciousness of one’s position before God 
and our own souls, and of the absolute nothing which such pro- 
vocations are, in our strivings after eternity. But to feel thus 
needs an enlightened, a lowly, yet a noble mind ; and not such 
was the disposition of either Salome or her mother. Of the 
latter, however, we read so little, except in conjunction with 
Salome, that we rather suppose her weak than wicked ; too 
indolent herself to conspire against another ; but willing 
enough to follow where a more energetic spirit would lead ; and, 
in consequence, an equal accessary to evil deeds. To Salome, 
however, no negative terms need be applied; and the only 
relief we can discover in the perusal of her history, is that she 
was no woman of Israel. Even in that awful period of sin, the 
daughters of Israel had not thus fallen. Alexandra, indeed, 
vas evil enough ; but for her a train of fearful circumstances, a 
succession of misfortunes from treachery and cruelty, may be 
some palliation. In her, some womanly feelings once had exist- 
ence ; in Salome there were none. The petty vices and faults 
»f woman were indeed the foundation of all her after-crimes ; 


PERIOD VI. MARIAMNE. 


193 


out iii the overspreading poisoning torrent of her thoughts and 
deeds, we can scarcely believe that its source lay in those small 
and often invisible springs of petty faults dwelling in every 
voinan’s breast. 

The extreme beauty of her brother’s bride would by such a 
disposition have been looked on as an unpardonable crime. 
Even ordinary attractions must have sunk to nothing, before the 
sweet innocence and freshness of such loveliness as Mariam ne’s. 
Her pure Asmonaean blood, her lineage from a thousand priests, 
the ordained of God, aud reverenced of His people, all was felt 
as a reproach to the haughty Idumaean, who, exalt herself as 
she might, could never boast such proud descent ; and when to 
these sources of irritation were added the scorn and contempt of 
Mariamne’s mother, and the daily provocations thence ensuing, 
heightened perhaps by the lofty bearing of the object of her 
hate herself, all recurring through successive weeks, months, and 
years, whilst they were thrown together in one home, which 
they dared not quit, because of the dangers awaiting them with- 
out, and with no possibility at that period of evincing the hate 
consuming her, it became concentrated, defined, laid out in 
varied schemes, waiting but the opportunity to work, which, 
when it came, transformed her from the woman to the fiend. 

That she imparted her machinations to her mother at that 
time is not likely. She was probably contented with infusing 
such hatred of Alexandra and her daughter, as w^ould secure her 
a willing agent in Cypros whenever she needed one. Provoca- 
tions which the weak character of Cypros might have been too 
indolent even to remember, were recalled and magnified, till the 
sting of their recollection so rankled, that even time could not 
remove it, and from them hatred sprang. Weak characters are 
quite as susceptible of the passions as strong ones; perhaps 
even more, for the latter can be guided by reason, the former 
cannot. 

Amongst characters like these was the hapless Mariamne 
thrown without the power of escape, for those three or four 
years of her young existence, when the influences and impressions 
should be but virtue’s own. At fourteen or fifteen what could 
she have known of life, except as imparted by her mother, her 
sole instructress ? And in those three years’ residence in Masada, 
what opportunity had she to weaken the maternal influence, by 
presenting to her notice such noble and high specimens of hef 


194 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


sex, as would cause her awakening mind to doubt and question, 
and without lessening the affection and duty of a child, yet bid 
her shrink from qualities and propensities which she could not 
love ? Who was there to lead her to the pure unsullied fount 
of woman’s virtue, and bid her to conquer the trifling faults of 
her misguided education, so that not even hatred could fling its 
dart upon her, but enmity itself fall powerless, not from the utter 
absence of cause, for, alas ! when did that ever quench hatred, 
but of opportunity for its display ? 

Such a guide she had not ; and w r e can only marvel that 
under such influences, such impressions, it is only “ haughtiness,” 
and a “ want of moderation,” of which the historian can accuse 
her. That she should have treated both Cypros and Salome 
with some haughtiness was only natural. Her mother’s conduct 
must have guided hers ; and the visible dislike with which she 
was regarded by the Idumaeans, could but have fallen coldly 
and painfully on the eager heart of youth. In those three years, 
her brother was the being to whom, in all probability, Mariamne 
clung with all the warm passionate emotions of her Eastern 
nature. Nearly the same age, equally lovely, equally gifted, the 
affections of the young Asmonaeans became concentrated in each 
other. It was not to Alexandra, much as no doubt they loved 
her, that her children could reveal all the gushing tide of feeling, 
hope, joy, and awakening intellect which so characterizes and 
blesses youth. The character which a careful study of the 
history marks as Alexandra’s, could not have bent down to the 
freshness and artlessness of her children’s. Wrapt in her own 
cares, for undoubtedly she had many, and sad ones — her own 
vindictive feelings towards the family of her son-in-law — the 
present and the future glooming darkly and terribly over her 
and hers — her aged father in the hands of his enemy, Antigonus, 
who, though his own nephew, scrupled not to deprive him for 
over of the capacity for the high priesthood, by the mutilation 
of his ears — Masada itself continually liable to attack and seizure 
— and the safety of herself and children continually in jeopardy, 
for Antigonus was not likely to forget, if they were once in his 
power, that the youthful Aristobulus, as the son of his eldei 
brother Alexander, had more claim to the sovereignty than him 
self. These were thoughts, all sufficient to render even a gentle 
and amiable character too sadly anxious to enter into the 
hopeful buoyancy of youth. 


PERIOD VI. MARIAM NEo 


195 


Alexandra’s haaghty and intriguing spirit would bury it all 
deep in her own breast, and coldness, indifference, and pride 
mark her outward demeanor. Under such circumstances, the 
love between Mariamne and Aristobulus could not fail to grow 
stronger, more sustaining, and more consoling, with every pass- 
ing year. No affection is purer, stronger, more enduring, and 
lovely in its truth, than that subsisting between a brother and 
sister, when it does exist ; perhaps it is even stronger when the 
sister is by one or two years the elder. It makes them more 
twin in age, capabilities, mutual appreciation, and comprehension 
of each other, than had the boy the advance in years. It is a 
distinct, wholly distinct feeling, to that which actuates sister 
towards sister. There, pure and beautiful as such affection is, 
it is wholly feminine. In the other case, the highest and noblest 
qualities of the brother insensibly infuse themselves into the 
sister, banishing in consequence all those petty failings and weak- 
nesses which are natural to woman ; and all the sister’s purest, 
most spiritual, and unselfish influences, infuse themselves by the 
same process into the heart of the brother, and purifying it from 
its grosser and more worldly nature, make each more worthy, 
and more capable of entering into the other’s feelings, and so 
twine them together, with a link strong as adamant, and pure 
as the crystal fount of love, whence all such affection comes. 
But this is no common emotion, or always existing when a sister 
and brother are of so near an age. Character and circumstance 
may both unite to prevent as well as to create it. Between 
Mariamne and Aristobulus, an earnest study of their characters 
and destiny seems to prove convincingly that it had existence. 
They had none other with whom to divide it ; not even separated 
by education, or by Aristobulus being called to war, or to the 
Priesthood, as might have been the case had their country been 
at peace, and the young scions of royalty occupying their natural 
position in their father’s court. They shared one common dan- 
ger, one common lot — were mutually the darlings of their peo- 
ple — mutually the objects of dread and hate to the opposing fac- 
tions — mutually of consequence to Herod, whose ambition he 
Knew would have no firm foundation, unless secured through 
them ; all this combined to unite the natural links of affection 
(which assimilating characters had already so closely bound) 
with such strength and firmness, that their violent severing was 


196 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


in all probability the first and final cause of Mariamne’s estrange- 
ment'from her husband. Could it be otherwise? 

We have lingered some time on this residence at Masada, 
•vhich historians in general pass over in five or six lines, being 
too intent upon the manoeuvres and actions of Ilerod, to examine 
deeper into the origin of those dark and terrible deeds which 
afterwards so devastated his own household. But the object of 
our consideration is Mariamne, and not Herod ; and therefore, 
we are anxious, by reflection on the early years of her life, on 
the circumstances which influenced her maturer character, and 
in fact her destiny itself, to throw light on those darker portions 
of her history which in general are touched upon alone. In a 
perusal of the historians open to us, we find ourselves scarcely 
knowing whether to blame or pity, and certainly quite unable to 
form a correct estimate of Mariamne’s character. Her fearful 
trials, her early provocations, the dark influences which prevented 
the complete correction of her few natural faults, all these, in the 
bare recital of events, are impossible to be discovered, without 
that attentive study of causes as well as of events, of the origin 
as well as of the end, which in a more rapid perusal of History 
is not possible to be attained. We have excused our prolixity 
before, by assuring our readers that our notices of individuals 
are far more suggestive than narrative, more essays than histories, 
and can only entreat them to bear with us still ; the characters 
of History demanding the same treatment as those of the Bible, 
still inculcating a moral, though not the same inspired lesson. 

The three years passed at Masada were not without frequent 
attacks from without, in addition to the annoyances within. 
The Parthian allies of Antigonus overran the country, and 
probably frequently threatened the fortress, though we do 
not hear of any direct siege till that under Antigonus himself, 
which appears to have lasted several months, and to have 
exposed the garrison and inmates to dreadful suffering, from the 
want of water. Meanwhile, Herod had arrived at Rome, 
and besought Augustus and Antony to confer the sovereignty 
of Judea on the young Aristobulus, who united in his own per- 
son the claims of both the contending sons of Alexandei 
Janmeus, and grant him (Herod) the office of governor under 
nim. The very nature of the request reveals the subtle policy 
of the man ; no one can imagine there was any further sincerity 


PERIOD VI. — MARIAM N E . 


197 


in his prosecution of Aristobulus’ rightful claims, than the fear of 
grasping too much by the actual demand of the crown for him- 
self, and so losing all. Besides, had he done so, he lost at once 
all the confidence of Alexandra ; whereas, by making her son’s 
claims apparently his first object, he riveted it on himself, 
as the only one likely to give her aid. That the Romans chose 
to confer the sovereignty on him instead of on Aristobulus, 
could not be attributed to any undue ambition on his part 
That Alexandra was satisfied that he had at that time done all 
he could for her son, appears likely, from her making no effort 
for him herself until Herod’s resolution to deny him any share 
in the government became more evident. 

Seven days after his royal appointment, Herod left Rome, and 
hree months afterwards was in Judea. Masada was of course 
his first object; the forces of Antigonus, aided by the want 
of water, had nearly reduced it, when a timely fall of heavy rain 
relieved the one, and Herod’s impetuous attack removed the 
other. Mariamne had not, however, very long to renew 
her acquaintance with her betrothed husband. He appears 
only to have relieved Masada, and instantly departed with 
the intention of reducing Jerusalem ; but was foiled by the 
treacherous desertion of his principal ally. Unable with his 
native forces to subdue Judea, he fixed his head quarters 
at Samaria, and by his vigilant and energetic measures, freed 
the province of Galilee from the bands of robbers with which it 
had been infested. The following year he recommenced mea- 
sures against Antigonus ; but it was not till the spring of the 
next year that the siege of Jerusalem was regularly begun. 
During the siege Herod returned to Samaria, to complete 
his marriage with Mariamne, two years after he had been 
made king by the Romans, and consequently nearly five 
since their first betrothal. Where Mariamne, her mother and 
brother, had been since the siege was raised from Masada, 
history does not reveal. We rather suppose that when Hercd 
fixed his winter quarters at Samaria, all the females of his 
family joined him there. It appears strange that he did 
not solemnize his marriage then, instead of waiting to do so in 
the very midst of a most momentous siege. That ambition, not 
love, was the original incentive of his union with Mariamne, is 
proved at once by this proceeding. He feared that even 
the power of his arms would not have secured him the affections 


193 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


of the people of Judea, or reconciled them to his conquest 
of Antigonus, only that he might ascend the Asmonaean throne 
himself ; and that his obstacle should be lessened, if it could not 
be entirely removed, occasioned his sudden resolution to leave 
the walls of Jerusalem, and at once unite himself with the 
Asmonaean princess. Once really his wife, he probably felt 
no chances could divide them, and so give her influence to 
another. The people would second him for her sake ; and out 
of regard to his queen, forget he was that Idumsean alien, whom 
so many detested, while they feared. The event proved 
the wisdom of his policy. At Samaria, the young and 
lovely Mariamne became indissolubly his wife, and many 
faithful partisans of her father instantly joined him with such 
reinforcements as enabled Herod to march with renewed spirit 
against Jerusalem. If Mariamne indeed loved Herod at that 
time, her life must have been a chaos of anxiety and fear. He 
never returned to remain with her, but left her again after 
a very brief interval, to encounter renewed dangers. Conti- 
nually thrown amongst his relatives, whose envy and dislike 
were not likely to decrease now she was really his wife, she 
must, indeed, have rejoiced, when, after a protracted siege, Jerusa- 
lem submitted, and Herod was acknowledged sovereign of Judea. 

His endeavors to preserve the city from the vengeance of 
the Komans, his protection of holy places, and care of the reli- 
gious prejudices of the people, were all actions likely to elevate his 
character in the ftiind of his young bride. Antigonus had 
received his death-doom from the Romans, not from Herod. 
Compared with the awful iniquities of the time, his career had 
been unusually free from atrocity; and even the unsparing 
executions of the Antigonian faction, which followed his acces- 
sion, his policy, no doubt, knew how to excuse, so as to appear 
actual necessity to his wife, and not the relentless cruelty which 
they seem to us. 

For a few, a very few months, Mariamne may have enjoyed 
some degree of happiness and peace. The mass of the people, 
devotedly attached to the Asmonaean family, were stilled into 
some degree of submission, because she shared Herod’s throne : 
but too soon even this transient calm was to pass away. Herod 
was sovereign of Judea, endured because of his connexion with 
the Asmonaean line ; but even this connexion would not permit 
his assumption of the priesthood. He, an Idumsean, an alien 


PERIOD VI. MARIAMNE. 


199 


—but a “ half Jew,” as the people called him, — occupy that 
office of solemnity, the delegate of God himself ! It was a thing 
unheard of, even in the most fearful annals of Jewish history, 
and impossible to be permitted. Herod always appeared aware 
of this; for at the commencement of his reign he made no 
attempt to assume it nominally, even though the measures he 
adopted, proved that he had resolved that all the actual power 
should be his own. Hyrcanus, the father of Alexandra, had been 
_nvited to Jerusalem, and treated with great apparent respect 
and regard by Herod, as the grandfather of his wife. The rauth 
lation of his ears, however, disqualified him from again assuming 
the priesthood ;* and neglecting not only the righ rful heir to 
that solemn office, but many others of noble lineage and high 
qualities, in Jerusalem, Herod sent for Ananel, an obscure indi- 
vidual, but of priestly descent from the Babylonian Jews, and 
appointed him High Priest. 

This was an insult impossible to be borne with patience, either by 
Alexandra or the Asmonajan faction. The office of High Priest had 
been hereditary, from Aaron downwards. The law had made no 
condition for the exclusion of rightful heirs, save that of being 
“ without blemish.” Youth was no preventive ; and while the 
young Aristobulus lived, and united in his own person not only 
the claims of his priestly race, but of two contending parties, to 
appoint another to the priesthood was an insult to the whole 
nation, impossible to be overlooked. The people were in a tur- 
moil of indignation, but too much awed by the severity and 
power of Herod to attempt any popular disturbance ; but all the 
mother’s feelings were roused to more than passive indignation. 
She wrote to Cleopatra, beseeching her influence with Antony, 
to compel Herod’s appointment of her son. Aided by a musi- 
cian, her letters were conveyed to the far-famed queen of Egypt, 
who complied with the request ; but Antony, unwilling to inter- 
fere with the civil government of the king he had himself created, 
hesitated and procrastinated, without coming to any decision. 
Meanwhile Dellius, a man infamous for his licentious conduct, 
and the friend and confidant of Antony, visited Jerusalem. 
The extraordinary beauty of the brother and sister elicited his 
wondering admiration ; and in his secret conferences with 

* This proves how faithfully, even at this period, some of the laws of 
Moses were still obeyed. “ The priests were to be without blemish.’' 
Levit. xxi. 17 — 24. 


200 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


Alexandra, he persuaded her to have their pictures taken, and 
sent to Antony, who would then be unable to refuse anything 
they asked. The horrible nature of this proposal would, we 
ought to imagine, have been rejected by a Jewish mother with 
indignation and abhorrence ; but, worked on by her ambitious 
and intriguing spirit, even these revolting means were adopted, 
and the picture sent : and to this woman had the tender years 
of Mariamne been intrusted I From a mind capable of such 
black, such unnatural horror, had the pure chaste mind of youth 
received its first impressions : and, knowing this, shall we not 
almost marvel at the stainless, shadowless purity, encircling the 
daughter of such a mother, almost like a halo, rendering h'r 
impalpable, and so transmitting every baleful arrow aimed 
against her, as would the atmosphere itself ! 

The honor of Mariamne was, however, in this instance, safer 
with Antony than with Alexandra. The fiendish counsels of 
Dellius only prevailed upon him to send for Aristobulus ; but 
Herod refused to obey, encouraged by the clause in Antony’s 
letter, not to send the young man, “ if he thought it hard upon 
him so to do.” And no resentment followed. Aristobulus 
himself interfered not with the machinations working for and 
against him. His youth, his tastes, probably rendered him con- 
tented with the life of calm retirement which his exclusion from 
office permitted ; but the love his sister bore him, her perfect 
consciousness of the rights and claims of her noble line, could 
not permit her to behold this indignity in silence. There is a 
calm dignity pervading the character of Mariamne, even in her 
youth, which almost unconsciously impresses us with a convic- 
tion of her own high sense of her priestly lineage, and its lofty 
claims, which no personal danger, no timid consideration, could 
ever remove. The daughters and wives of priestly lineage were 
looked upon by their countrymen, from the very first delivery 
of the law, as sharing the sanctity of their fathers and husbands, 
and reverenced accordingly, as higher in station according to 
popular decision, as purer and holier in conduct than the wives 
and daughters of sovereigns. We read but too often of royal 
unions with the daughters of the heathen ; but never but once of 
such abomination occurring in the households of the priests. 
Pride of birth, of descent, was almost the first impression on the 
hearts of the young daughters of the priests ; that they might 
preserve both unsullied. And Mariamne was not likely to for* 


PERIOD VI. MARIAMNE. 


201 


get this precious heritage. It was not in accordance with a 
descendant of the Asmonaeans to regard herself as queen mere!} 
as the wife of Herod. By right of heritage the kingdom was 
her brother’s and her own : and though the arms of the Romans 
had conferred the crown on Herod, how might she behold the 
exclusion of her brother from his own hereditary honors, which 
it was in the power of her husband to grant or to refuse ? 

Mariamne ceased not her entreaties and expostulations till 
her boon was granted ; still not so much for his love of her, to 
which passion Josephus imputes most of Herod’s actions concern- 
ing his wife’s family, but because he felt that, once established 
as High Priest, Aristobulus would have no temptation to leave 
the country, but would always remain in his power, to be removed 
whenever his unscrupulous cruelty deemed fitting. Assembling 
his friends, he told them that “ Alexandra had conspired against 
his authority, seeking, by the aid of Cleopatra, to elevate her 
son to his throne — a proceeding doubly unjust, as it would 
deprive her daughter of the dignity she now had, and would 
bring disturbances into the kingdom. He had, therefore, in his 
anxiety to retain it, resolved to give the youth the high priest- 
hood ; and that he had, in fact, only set up Ananel, because 
Aristobulus was so young a child.” 

We have marked one line of this politic speech in italics, 
because it appears to us so convincing, that Herod himself was 
aware that his principal hold, as sovereign of the Jews, on the 
people, was his union with Mariamne. The depriving her of 
the dignity she now enjoyed, would have been of very little 
moment to him individually, if he had not strongly felt that 
her dignity supported his, and if one were shaken, so would be 
the other. 

The appointment of Aristobulus reconciled the people in a 
measure to their king, and, for a brief interval, quieted the 
intriguing Alexandra. She professed, with many tears, “ that 
she had never sought the kingdom for her son, nor would she 
accept it were it offered ; having that confidence in Herod’s 
capability of governing as would secure the safety of the remaim 
der of her family ; that she was satisfied, nay, overcome, by 
Herod’s benefits, and thankfully accepted the honor showed by 
him to her son, praying him to excuse her if the nobility of her 
family , and the freedom of acting which that nobility , she 


102 


THE WOMEN OF IdUAEL. 


thought, allowed her, had made her act too precipitately and 
imprudently on this matter.” 

Josephus, who, in his own person, was a great stickler foi 
woman’s inferiority, would certainly not have put such words in 
Alexandra’s mouth, if they had no foundation in the customs 
and characteristics of the Jewish people. He must have known 
that freedom of acting was perfectly compatible with the 
Hebrew woman’s social position, or she could not have alluded 
to, and sought to excuse it. Nor would Herod, as we shall see 
in the sequel, have deprived her of liberty, had he not feared 
that she would again use it, to the detriment of his interest. 
For a while peace seemed established between these two 
equally dark and equally opposing spirits. Mariamne saw her 
beloved brother in his rightful position ; and rejoiced that one 
subject of contention was thus removed. Her mind was too 
pure, too upright, to harbor suspicion of those around her. 
How could she penetrate the secret thoughts and wishes of her 
husband, or believe that, in the very fulfilment of her anxious 
wish, her brother’s death-warrant was, in the tyrant’s inmost 
heart, already sealed ? Glad to escape from the pressure of 
care and sorrow which had darkened her early years, Mariamne 
probably gave herself up to the delight of her domestic 
affections, unconscious of the brooding passions in her mother’s 
heart, or their provocation by her husband. 

Fearful that Alexandra would renew her plots and innova- 
tions, Herod desired that she should dwell in the palace, his 
subtle policy most likely concealing the real reason of this 
command, under the same show of reverence and honor with 
which he had welcomed Hyrcanus to the same dangerous 
precincts. But Alexandra’s equally subtle penetration speedily 
discovered that her guard, appointed ostensibly in honor of her 
high rank, were creatures of Herod, restraining her liberty, and 
spies upon her most private hours, and most unguarded words. 
Burning with indignation she wrote to Cleopatra, beseeching 
her assistance and advice, declaring that she would undergo 
anything, rather than continue to live in this state of slavery. 
The very indignation which it causes her, proves how little 
accustomed were the women of Israel to the faintest semblance 
of restraint. 

Cleopatra, who appears always to have befriended Alexandra 


PERIOD VI. — MARIAMNE 


203 


(another proof in wliat light the Jewish female aristocracy were 
regarded by foreign nations), advised her to escape with her son 
into Egypt, where she promised them protection. Alexandra 
eagerly assented. She ordered two coffins to be made, as foi 
two dead bodies. In these she intended to conceal herself and 
her son, desiring her servants, whom she could trust, to convey 
them away in the night time, and bear them to the sea-shore, 
where a ship would be waiting to take them to Egypt. The 
scheme promised fair, but was defeated, by its being spoken of 
to Sabion, one of her friends, under the impression that he was 
already in her confidence. This Sabion, believing its discovery 
would insure him favor, betrayed it to the king. Herod 
permitted the plan to go on, that he might be assured of its 
existence, and discovered the whole at the very moment 
Alexandra believed its success complete. Still no outward 
evidence of his anger appeared. He stood in too much dread 
of Cleopatra’s influence with Antony, if exerted against himself, 
to adopt harsh measures against Alexandra. With every 
manifestation of generosity and kindness, more than likely to 
inspire the gratitude and affection of his young wife, he over- 
looked the offence ; but his unhappy victim was marked for 
removal. It seems strange that Herod did not seek the 
destruction of Alexandra in the young man’s stead, for there 
was nothing in his dawning character to arouse a tyrant’s dread, 
except, indeed, those lofty virtues and outward attractions, 
which might mark him as a dangerous rival to the wily 
Idumaean. Still, though resolved in his diabolical purpose, he 
writed, lest a t;o summary removal might work against himself 


CHAPTER VII. 

MARIAMNE (CONTINUED). 

Tiie Feast of Tabernacles neared, and the whole populatior 
af Judaea flocked, in exact accordance with the Law, to Jeru 


204 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


salem. Festivity reigned throughout the city — the land was at 
rest from foreign oppressors — the spirit of factiou itself seemed 
stilled — from palace to hut all was solemn rejoicing and light- 
hearted merriment. On the holy days of convocation the 
immense areas and courts of the temple were thronged with the 
dense multitudes, eager to receive the high priests triennial 
blessing. And there he stood, the youthful descendant of 
a thousand priests, and warriors, and kings, in the first bloom of 
graceful youth, clothed in the magnificent vestments of the 
solemn office, majestic in his bearing, so unusually tall and 
inely proportioned, in his still boyish figure — his beautiful coun- 
tenance, so radiant with the holy thoughts and feelings which 
his task called forth, that, as the multitudes gazed upon him 
standing at the high altar, gracefully and collectedly performing 
his priestly duties, themselves never witnessed (from their 
peculiar sanctity and holy associations) without emotion, enthu- 
siasm, even at that holy moment, could not be restrained. 
Tears burst forth from young and old — the warrior, even as the 
woman, wept, thrilled to the very heart at the beauty, inno- 
cence, and sanctity he beheld, though himself unconscious why 
he wept. Tears, blessings, prayers, swelling at length into 
shouts of joyous greeting, betrayed the zeal and love which 
burst irrepressibly from every heart. What was the sovereign 
himself, though present, compared with the High Priest — their 
own, not only in himself, but in his glorious race and family, the 
traits of whom he bore upon his features ? And if such were the 
emotions of the multitude, what feelings must have swelled the 
hearts of the mother and sister ? However ill-regulated ambition, 
and its awful train of evil passions, had marred the heart and 
mind of Alexandra, in all things relating to Aristobulus she 
felt as an anxious and affectionate mother; and some of 
the purest emotions which she had ever experienced, must have 
been excited in thus beholding him. And to his fond sister, 
what delicious emotions of love and admiration, aye, and rever- 
ence, for she knew him worthy of the solemn office, must have 
heightened and hallowed the deep affection she had ever borne 
him, as the hand-in-hand companion of her childhood and 
youth ! Each quivering blessing, each ringing shout, found echo 
in her heart. 

Darkly and terribly in contrast with such emotions did 
the storm of jealous hate rage in the bosom of Herod. He 


PERIOD VI. MARI A.MNE. 


205 


beheld, or fancied, in the popular enthusiasm, rebellion against 
himself; in the grace and beauty of a boy, greater danger 
io his power and himself, than he had ever encountered, or 
feared from a thousand warriors, or from the wisdom and policy 
of a hundred veterans. But though the internal tempest could 
only be stilled by the victim’s blood, Herod dissembled, and 
joined with apparent sincerity in the public rejoicing. 

The festival passed; the multitudes dispersed in quiet from 
the capital to their respective homes. A hush of peace, foreign 
and domestic, seemed to have sunk on the troubled land ; and 
Alexandra and her young son returned to the former’s palace at 
Jericho. There, after a brief interval, they were joined by 
Herod and some of his court, no doubt including Mariamne ; 
and a period of feasting and royal amusements followed. 
All enmity against Aristobulus had apparently subsided. Herod 
treated the young man with a semblance of caressing fondness, 
only too likely to remove suspicion both from Mariamne and 
her brother. Alexandra herself seems at that time to have 
suspected nothing evil. The skies over their head, and the dis- 
tant horizon, all were smiling in cloudless blue and glowing 
sunshine, when the bolt fell with a shock of horror as if indeed 
nature had thundered from her very smiling calm, and hurled a 
death-bolt from her sun-lit sky. The young prince had quitted 
the palace in company with the sovereign and their respective 
attendants ; and wandered carelessly along the gardens and 
pastures, till they neared some spacious fishponds. The day 
was sultry, and many plunged into the refreshing waters, 
to indulge in the luxury (truly so, in the scorching East) 
of bathing. At first, the young prince had stood aloof, amused 
at the various manoeuvres in the art of swimming, displayed 
by his attendants, but instigated by Herod to try his skill also, 
willingly joined them. Twilight was advancing, but still the 
sports continued, till from the closing darkness a wild cry 
resounded, and then a suffocating moan, and then a shout from 
many voices for “ help, the prince v r as drowning but it came 
too late. The measures of the tyrant and his fiendish helpers 
had been too well taken, and the hapless youth was conveyed 
home to his distracted relatives a lifeless corpse, not three hours 
after he had quitted them, radiant in loveliness and life. A 
violent death is always fearful to the bereaved survivors, and 
how doubly aggravated when traced to relentless murder ! The 


20C THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 

actual cause of the young man’s death must certainly have 
transpired, else Josephus, who generally tries to exonerate 
Herod, would not so decidedly have attributed this murder 
to him. As deep and universal as had been the love and sym- 
pathy which he had inspired at the altar, so deep and universal 
was the affliction at his loss ; every family, to use the (in this 
instance) expressive words of the historian, “ looking on this 
calamity, not as it belonged to another, but that one of them- 
selves was slain .” How inexpressible, how harrowing, must 
then have been the agony of his mother and sister ; and in the 
latter how awfully heightened, by the scarcely restrained voice 
of public indignation, pointing to her husband as his ruthless 
murderer ! How many circumstances must, in those moments 
of agony, have returned to the heart of Mariamne, startlingly, 
appallingly convincing of the foundations for those rumors. 
Herod had in truth wept, in fearful agitation, as the body of the 
youth was exposed before him ; but there are moments when 
the vision of the soul is clearer than heretofore — when human 
agony is such that semblances which successfully deceived 
before, cast down their robes of falsehood, and appear naked 
in their own hideousness — and so it probably was with 
Mariamne. Tears and agitation, which a moment of suf- 
fering might have so deceived, as to lead her to her husband’s 
bosom for consolation, now spoke the language, not of grief for 
bereavement, but remorse and horror for the deed ; revealed 
him not mourner but murderer. Where was she to turn 
in that deep agony ? Her mother had concealed her utter 
desolation, her passionate cravings for revenge, under an 
exterior of such chilling despair, that how might she give 
comfort ? He, whom she had loved longest and best on earth, 
aye, even better than her husband ; for Herod’s was not a cha- 
racter so to concentrate all affection in himself, that the silver 
links of natural affection had been dulled before it ; her brother 
in blood, in love, in the proud glories of their ancient race and 
heritage, he lay in his cold grave ; and dark suspicions filled her 
heart, that the only other being in the wide w r orld whom 
her young spirit could have loved, was that brother’s murderer! 
What to her were the magnificent honors which were lavished 
on his senseless remains, but as a mockery to the dead, and 
triumph to the living, that the last obstacle to his ambition w r as 
removed ? If thus it w\as considered even by the fickle 


VERIOD VI. MARIAMNE. 20 * 

multitude, whose opinion magnificence and show generally 
guide where a sovereign wills, can we doubt that it was thus 
considered by the bereaved and agonized sister, to whom 
the private character of Herod must have been more unguardedly 
displayed ? She had been too young, too innocent, too con- 
fiding to become aware of it before ; but when awakened 
by a flash of agony like this, how might the confidence, 
the guileless trust of youth return ? She had lived little more 
than twenty years ; but she was now alone, and in that word 
dwells AGE. 

Mariamne’s deep affliction was visible only in her change of 
bearing towards her husband, and the mournful ageing of indi- 
vidual character. But Alexandra’s anguish could have no rest, 
no peace, till lost in the wild wish and matured measures for 
revenge. Till reason regained ascendency, her agony was such, 
that suicide seemed the only relief ; but then came the desire to 
live, even to prolong life, till vengeance was accomplished : and 
so to prolong life demanded all possible care, by neither word 
nor act, to offend Herod, whose unscrupulous cruelty would not 
spare her, more than her son. To deceive him, therefore, was 
that semblance of belief in his professed grief assumed, which 
must so have chilled the heart of her daughter — an apparent 
satisfaction from the honors awarded to her boy in death — an 
impenetrable concealment of every suspicion that murder, not 
accident, had deprived her of her child, marked her outward 
conduct, while in secret she wrote to Cleopatra, detailing the 
whole affair, and conjuring her influence to bring Herod to 
justice. 

With all her weaknesses, all her faults, the Egyptian queen 
appears fully capable of woman’s kindest feelings. Indignant at 
the treacherous action, and sympathizing deeply in the mother’s 
agony, Cleopatra never rested till she had prevailed on Antony 
to summon Herod before him, and defend himself from an 
accusation so fraught with treachery and horror. As this com- 
mand was not, however, sent until Antony was in Laodicea, tho 
year following the murder, some months must have elapsed, 
which probably removed all suspicion of Alexandra having been 
concerned in the charge. We only read of Herod being in 
great fear of the accusation, and of Cleopatra’s known ill-will 
towards him. Had he suspected Alexandra as the originator 


208 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


we cannot doubt but that ber death, either by secret murdei 01 
public execution, would instantly have followed. 

Finding it impossible to evade the summons, Herod left the 
charge of his kingdom to his uncle Joseph, as procurator of the 
government. With this public office he connected a private 
one ; the extraordinary command, that if Antony should 
condemn him to death, Joseph would instantly slay Mariamne, 
giving as his ostensible reason that he had so tender an affectiou 
for his wife, that he could not bear the idea of her becoming, 
after his death, the wife of any other man. Joseph promised 
compliance, and Herod departed. 

The historians of this period appear to believe in Herod’s 
revealed reason for wishing the death of his wife, and lay great 
stress on the deep love he bore her. Love ! Can it be possible 
that sober, reasoning men, looking back on these events, tracing 
the whole character of this man as a map before them — behold- 
ing not one softening feeling, not one human emotion, not one 
pitying pause in his ruthless career — perceiving that his every 
aim, intent, desire, apart from individual aggrandizement, was 
the denationalization of Judea — to incorporate it with the 
heathen kingdoms, and, increasing his own power, exterminate 
its’ peculiar people from the face of the earth — can it be possible, 
we repeat, that thoughtful and reasoning men, who at this 
distance of time can look back with much clearer ken on the 
records of the past, than those historians but lately removed 
from the scenes and personages of whom they write, can yet 
adopt the views of Josephus, simply because he wrote them, and 
believe that love could ever have actuated Herod in command- 
ing the death of his wife, or have guided his intercourse with her 
while she lived ? Jealousy and selfishness might, indeed, have 
appeared to his own heart like love, but the reality would have 
dictated differently. He might, indeed, in his selfish tyranny, 
have resolved that she should never give to, nor receive happi- 
ness from any other man ; but if we judge of him according to 
his character and acts, there was yet another and deeper reason. 
He could not bear the thought, that the Asmonsean faction, 
whom he so hated, so oppressed, so sought to exterminate in life, 
should obtain ascendency on his downfall, and rule that land 
which he had destined for himself. Mariamne was now almost 
its sole representative, with the exception of the aged Hyrcanus, 


PERIOD VI. MARIAMNE. 


20 £ 


who, though unfitted for the office of high priest, might yet rule 
fts sovereign — and his kinsmen, the sons of Babas. Of the exist- 
ence of these last, Herod was ignorant, having years before 
commanded their death. 

Herod could not have doubted that, on the event of his death 
Mariamne would instantly be acknowledged sovereign. The 
customs of the country had already provided examples of a wife 
succeeding her husband ; nor was it likely this rule would be 
waived, when, as in the case of Mariamne, it was the Wife and 
not the husband who possessed legal, hereditary, and national 
right to the governmeut. When we reflect on the extreme 
jealousy which Herod bore towards all the Asmonaeans — that 
he never permitted an opportunity to pass without cutting them 
off- — we have surely some foundation for the belief, that the 
jealousy of ambition , quite as deeply as the jealousy of love , 
actuated Herod in his determination, that if he died, Mariamne 
should die with him. He could not conquer the hated thought 
of beholding her ruling over a loving and obedient people in his 
stead, courted, followed, perchance united to one of her own race, 
willing and eager to join her in every effort to elevate Judea to 
her own exclusive holiness and pristine glory. 

This analysis of the motives of Herod’s barbarous command 
is merely offered to our readers as a suggestion. Histories of 
the time are open to them, and far more improving and satis- 
factory is it. for them to read, and to form their own conclusions, 
than adopt, without examination, those of another. 

From the words used by Josephus, we are led to imagine that 
Mariamne had a share in the government, and was consulted 
by the regent Joseph on all occasions. “ But as Joseph was 
ministering the 'public affairs of the kingdom , and was for that 
reason very frequently with Mariamne, both because his business 
required it, and because of the respect he sought to pay to the 
queen,” &c. Now, if the position of the Hebrew females had 
been what we are generally inclined to suppose it, the same as that 
of thepresent Eastern females, we should not find this very import- 
ant passage. The lines marked in italics demonstrate very 
forcibly, that Joseph was in the habit of consulting with the 
queen on all matters of business ; and he did so, not only 
because it was the custom of the country, but also from his great 
respect towards her, a respect which could not have been excited 
in the respective ages and relation of uncle and niece, if intellect; 


210 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


and wisdom, and dignity had not been added to, and enhanced 
the exceeding beauty and grace which she so eminently pos- 
sessed. 

Had any modern European historian penned the sentence we 
have quoted, its importance would not have been so great ; 
but coming from Josephus, intimately acquainted as he was 
with the manners and customs of the Jews of that day, it is a 
powerful proof of the perfect equality of the Jewish female, both 
in her domestic and social ‘position. Had it not been quite 
customary for such reference to the wife of the sovereign during 
his absence, the visits of Joseph must have excited, not only 
private, but public suspicion, and called for animadversions from 
the historian : instead of which he describes it quite naturally, 
as a usual and common occurrence : and furthermore, declares 
Salome’s accusations to be a groundless calumny, whose only 
foundation was individual hate. 

These facts, trifling as they seem, should be remembered, 
when we are told that the condition of the Jewish females was 
so degraded and enslaved. Josephus, individually, may have a 
mean opinion of the sex ; but his whole history, by an almost 
remarkable triumph of facts over 'prejudices , contradicts himself, 
and supplies us with unanswerable evidences of the truth of our 
theory. 

Apparently anxious to increase Mariamne’s love for her hus- 
band, or rather, perhaps, to remove the cold restraint which had 
marked her conduct towards him since her brother’s death, 
Joseph never allowed an opportunity to pass without alluding 
to the strong affection Herod bore her. Mariamne herself 
appears to have listened to these professions in silence. That 
love was strange and doubtful which only manifested itself in 
individual passion, wholly regardless of her feelings, as sister, 
daughter, and Asmongean : but complaint of Herod never passed 
her lips. Hers w r as that true spiritual dignity, never stooping 
to reveal to others her own sufferings, when the originator of 
those sufferings was her husband. 

Alexandra, however, listened to these speeches in a very dif- 
ferent spirit, and replied with such satirical scepticism, that 
Joseph, in his anxious desire to prove the depth and extent of 
his nephew’s love, incautiously revealed his last command, as an 
unanswerable evidence how dear she w r as to him, that he could 
not bear to separate himself from her, even in death. 


PERIOD VI. MARIAM NE. 21 \ 

The effect of this communication on Alexandra may be 
imagined. To lose her only remaining child for the gratification 
of a tyrant, would have been, in itself, agonizing enough ; but 
Alexandra was never actuated by such feminine emotions alone ; 
Bhe hated Herod : as murderer of her boy, it was not much 
wonder. She was enraged and indignant that he should pos- 
sess the heritage of her children : her mind was never quiet, 
constantly scheming and intriguing for his downfall ; and in so 
doing, almost always compassing the ruin of her own family in 
his stead ; and this last command she probably conceived, as we 
nave done, as instigated much more by his hatred of Mariamne’s 
race , than his love for her as an individual. 

But her endeavors to incite Mariamne to revenge upon her 
.ausband were useless. There is not a single portion in the life 
or character of the princess which can permit the supposition of 
any such emotion entering her mind, even tor a moment. What 
she felt at this command, even as from every other action of her 
husband, she did not reveal : but how fearfully and coldly must 
its dark selfishness have sunk into her heart. Life, except for 
one sweet tie (she was a mother), was, indeed, a dream of 
anxiety and sorrow ; but to be deprived of it by the mandate of 
cruelty and violence, was no thought of relief. Did no personal 
considerations mingle with it (which they must have done), her 
children called upon her to live for them : and by the sweet 
emotions they inspired, illumined the heavy darkness round her. 
How could she feel towards a husband, capable of issuing such 
a command ? What must have been the terror and anxiety, her 
daily portion till she could receive tidings of Herod’s fate ! And 
yet we read of neither word nor act, even in that horrible posi- 
tion, derogatory to the beautiful enduring consistency, which, to 
the very last, her character displayed. 

And even when the report came that Herod had been exe- 
cuted, the idea of seeking the protection of the .Romans 
originated with Alexandra, not with the one most injured. 
That Mariamne should adopt the plan, was natural for her 
children’s sake as well as her own ; for how might she bear the 
thought of leaving them to the care of Cypros and Salome, who 
would not scruple to gratify on them the hatred they bore her- 
self? How else, in fact, was she to preserve her life? She 
needed not the motive attributed to her, in conjunction with her 
mother, to lead her to the Roman camp. Her own people 


212 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


would have been sufficient protection, could she have appealed 
to them : but how could that be, when she was surrounded, 
almost imprisoned, by the relatives and creatures of Herod, whose 
bidding to them was absolute, even in his death ? 

That Mariamne looked to her personal influence with the 
licentious Antony, to protection and benefit, is disproved by the 
whole tenor of her life. A single impure thought would have 
prevented that perfect defence from all calumnious charges, 
which so satisfied the jealous Herod, that even he demanded 
nothing further than her simple word. Not even the most 
prejudiced can fling a doubt upon her name. 

That Alexandra urged her to seek the Roman camp, because 
she looked to her child’s influence with Antony, we believe, 
though we shudder as we do so ; for such a thought was in 
exact accordance with her previous unnatural proceeding, of 
forwarding to him the pictures of her children. But even from 
such an influence — a mother’s influence — Mariam ne’s own purity 
and innocence were her invulnerable shield. Alexandra dared 
not, could not have breathed such a thought to her ; and was, 
therefore, content to work in secret. But her plans were 
frustrated by news from Herod himself, contradicting the report 
of his death, and containing a flourishing account of his favor 
with Antony ; who not only established his absolute authority, 
as sovereign of Judea, but reproved Cleopatra for her interference. 
No allusion to the murder of Aristobulus appears to have been 
made on either side ; and terrible must have been the pang of 
such omission to Alexandra. 

While these events were passing, Salome had not been 
inwardly idle, though compelled, outwardly, to be on terms of 
intimacy with her brother’s wife. It was impossible for the 
lofty character of the Asraonaean princess to condescend to treat 
as an equal and friend, one whose real character her penetration 
had probably fully discovered, and whose dislike Salome had 
never taken any pains to conceal. Josephus tells us, Salome 
“ had a long time borne her ill-will ; for when they had 
discoursed with one another, Mariamne took great freedom ; 
and reproached the rest for the meanness of their birth.” The 
great freedom of such reproaches we must confess ourselves 
incapable of discovering. It had probably been during their 
mutual residence at Masada, as we before stated ; when 
Marian: ne was a mere girl, and worked upon bv the exarnj le 


PERIOD VI. MARIAMNE. 


213 


of lier mother, and the prejudices of her own educalion, to look 
down somewhat scornfully on Idumsean proselytes. That 
Salome had a “long time borne her ill-will,” evidently refers to 
that distant period, the stings of which still rankled, increased 
by the haughty reserve which had probably marked the queen’s 
conduct towards her since. It was not to the sister of her 
husband, Mariamne could breathe the agonized suspicion of her 
brother’s murderer ; not to Salome she could reveal sorrows and 
emotions concealed from every other. We have no doubt her 
manner was cold, nay, even haughty to a fault ; when it would 
have been more to her interest to have conciliated. But we 
are writing not of angelic, but of human nature ; and that she 
did not conciliate either Salome or Herod, as Josephus evidently 
thinks she ought, is, to us, a convincing proof of the consistent 
uprightness of her conduct. We do not read of Alexandra 
inspiring such enmity in Cypros and Salome as Mariamne ) 
because the former could feign , when she saw it was her 
interest, both forbearance and regard — the latter could not. 
That she thought somewhat too proudly of the “ accident of 
birth” in herself, and too scornfully of it in others, was the fault 
of her education, not of herself. 

An opportunity had now arrived for Salome’s secret plans to 
ripen. Accompanied by her mother, who, in these schemes, 
always appears just that secondary tool which an active and vindic- 
tive spirit would make of a passive weak one, Salome met Herod 
on his return to Judea ; and, informing him first of Alexandra’s 
intentions to seek the protection of the Romans, artfully insinuated 
that Joseph would no doubt have aided the intention, followed 
by a direct charge of dishonorable conduct between him and 
Mariamne. The feelings of any man would have been roused 
by this calumny. With Herod, jealousy generally maddened 
him into a fiend. But in this instance he acted more nobly 
than he ever did before or after ; and would almost persuade 
us that, could such a feeling be possible, he had moments of 
real love for Mariamne individually. He appealed to herself for 
the truth or falsehood of the calumny. How must even his 
fierce intriguing character have unconsciously acknowledged and 
loved the simple truth and purity of his wife, that even in such 
a moment he could have turned to her, and permitted the 
solemn assurance of innocence from her lips, to weigh against 


214 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


the accusations and proofs with which Salome and his mother 
sought to madden him against her ! 

The true dignity and natural amiability of Mariamne’s 
character are proved by her conduct in this interview. A really 
haughty, contentious, and scornful woman would have used 
reproaches, scarcely condescending to reply to such a charge, 
and instead of soothing, irritate still anew. Love her husband 
Mariamne could not, but she knew her duty as a wife. She 
could feel that, however he had injured her family and herself, 
in this instance he did her at least the justice to demand the 
truth or falsehood of the charge from her own lips, and with all 
a woman’s quickness of feeling, have felt for his agony under 
such a suspicion, and at that moment felt she might love him 
yet again. Conquering all personal emotions, she so calmly, so 
fully exculpated herself, that Herod was not only convinced, but 
conjured her to pardon the momentary suspicion. Her truth, 
her purity, seemed for the moment to infuse themselves into 
him, and to arouse his better nature. Professing, and by 
caresses endeavoring to manifest unbounded affection and firm 
confidence in her fidelity, Josephus tells us, that he sought to 
“ draw from her a like confidence in himself,” words very 
convincing, that Mariamne, even while she vindicated herself, 
never lost that lofty bearing, and quiet, gentle dignity, which, 
from the hour of her brother’s murder, had marked her conduct. 
Even to her husband she never stooped, as many women so 
situated would have done, to feign a love and confidence which 
she could not feel. She must have known that her life with 
him was in constant danger — a word might be her death-doom ; 
but she feared him not. Strong in her own innocence and noble 
virtues, she walked on her way, acting as honesty dictated, 
without turning this side or that, or fearing any peril that 
straightforwardness might bring. 

Exactly in accordance with the uncomplaining, but deeply 
feeling spirit, which would never breathe to any human ear the 
anguish and terror which Herod’s command must have excited, 
was the noble remonstrance which bade her reply to his entrea- 
ties for her confidence and love, “ if the command he had given, 
that if any harm had befallen him from Antony, she who had 
been no occasion of it should perish with him, were indeed * 
proof of his love for her !” 


PERIOD VI. MARIAMKE. 215 

Even had she known the evils which were to spring from this 
very simple question, Mariamne could not have permitted its 
recollection to rankle in her heart, and secretly poison every 
outward demonstration of Herod’s love. Touched, in all proba- 
oility, at his unwonted candor towards herself, her upright mind 
thrank from concealing her knowledge of his secret command, 
and she appealed to him, in the same confiding spirit as he had 
appealed to her ; but the effect was as different as their respec- 
tive characters. Herod sprang from her side in a burst of 
uncontrolled fury. Her truth, her purity, all passed away 
before a blaze of passion, appalling to witness, and terrible to 
feel. Madly believing that nothing but improper intimacy with 
Joseph could have called for such a betrayal of a command, 
imparted to his uncle in strictest confidence, he rushed upon 
Mariamne with his drawn sword, and. would have slain her 
on the spot, had not the calm and dignified composure, 
enhancing her extraordinary beauty, even at such a moment, 
disarmed him towards herself. His whole rage fell on Joseph 
and Alexandra ; ordering the immediate execution of the 
former without permitting trial, or even defence, and imprison- 
ing the latter with every mark of ignominy and insult. 

Why his rage, on this occasion, should so have fallen on 
Alexandra, appears rather a problem. He seems entirely to 
have overlooked the charge against her, of seeking the protection 
of the Romans, and to have imprisoned her on this implied 
supposition of being accessory to the dishonor of his wife. We 
rather imagine that he was rejoiced at any opportunity to get 
her cut of his way, without caring to give any reason for so 
doing. Nor does it appear quite clear to me, that after the 
first transports of his rage, and its gratification in the removal 
of two obnoxious individuals, he ever seriously retained any 
idea of Mariamne’s guilt. He evidently lived with her, and 
loved her (if he could love) as before, seeking to conciliate her 
at every opportunity ; as thus tacitly allowing, that he had 
accused and condemned her wrongfully ; and if he really had 
believed her guilty, this, even to Herod, would have been 
impossible. 

But whatever were his secret feelings, they could have 
brought neither rest nor comfort to the deeply wounded spirit 
of his injured wife. She must have felt more and more con- 
vinced that her life was not worth a day’s purchase, — her honor 
21 


216 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


constantly liable to be attacked, her innocence impossible to be 
proved, for neither law nor defence would be allowed her, com* 
pelled to associate in daily intimacy with the man who had actu- 
ally drawn his sword upon her, insulted, viliued, and then added 
to the horror with which she must have regarded him, by daring 
to profess love, and lavish caresses, from which she must have 
shrunk in utmost loathing, — her mother imprisoned, degraded . 
and though Mariamne was conscious of Alexandra’s many 
faults, she was yet her mother : her worst qualities were hidden 
from her child ; — the power of her race, the glory of her people, 
passing away before the successful ambition of an Idumaean 
usurper : the laws and customs of her country wholly disre- 
garded, that by a gradual, yet sure process, the manners and 
customs of heathen nations should take their place ; — it was 
impossible that to an Asmonaean, the last pure unmixed scion of 
that noble race, such feelings should be unknown ; and what 
then must have been the harrowing trials of her inward and 
outward life ? Yet we read of no manifestation of her intense 
suffering, no secret intrigues, no public appeals, no turning to 
equivocal sources of enjoyment, to banish the misery of home. 
No ! Compared with the dark machinations, the subtle intrigues 
of Salome, Alexandra, and Cypros, she stands forth in untouched 
and untarnished lustre, as some pure spirit of truth and light, 
sent upon the earth to whisper that even in the blackest and 
most appalling periods of human depravity, the divine essence 
breathed within us by God himself still has existence ; often, it 
may be, invisible, but still there. Historians do Mariamne no 
justice. It is only by reflection and analogy, that we can pene- 
trate the truth concerning her and other characters of the 
period ; and doing so with one or two, bringing out the strong 
lights of individual character against the dark shadows of the 
tyrant circumstance , — comparing what is with what might be, 
*it is thus we relieve truth in its crystal purity from the web of 
prejudice and superficial ism, and so learn the important lesson, 
that never yet was human nature wholly dark, or this earth left 
without some witnesses of the divinity within us. A mere 
glance over Josephus, and other historians compiled from him, 
confounds Mariamne with the intriguing and subtle spirits, male 
and female, by whom she was surrounded ; and thus it is that we 
can so seldom discern the good from the bad, the divine from 
the earthly, and we condemn all as equally evil, equally retro 


PERIOD VI. MARIAMNE. 


21*7 


grading. A careful study of history, not merely satisfied with 
the views of the writer, but using, freely and fearlessly, our own 
powers of reflection and analogy, would teach us much to fill 
our hearts with charity and hope, and inculcate the refreshing 
faith, that every ideal of the immortal mmd may find in the 
*r’riTAL its origin and end. 


CHAPTER Vlir. 

MARIAMNE (CONTINUE!;). 

For about four years Mariamne lived so far in peace, that no 
attack from the calumny of female hate, or from the violence of 
jealous passion, reached her individually. Her trials were from 
the sources to which we have already alluded. How fondly in 
this interim must her desolate heart have clung to her children, 
four of whom now called her mother ! The very names given 
to her sons reveal the love borne by her to her own race and 
family. All Herod’s other children had names relative to his 
Idumaean descent, or in compliment to his Roman allies. It 
was not likely that he would have chosen the name of Aristobulus 
f >r one of his sons, laden as it was with the recollection of his 
murdered victim ; but we may well imagine the feelings with 
which Mariamne bestowed it on her first-born — how, clinging 
to the memory of a brother so beloved, she should seek to con- 
tinue the name in her own family, and in the caresses of an 
infant Aristobulus, struggle for forgetfulness of the agony which 
still lingered round the memory of her brother. Her second 
eon she named Alexander, in respectful recollection of her hither. 
Her daughters, born afterwards, Salampsio and Cypros, do not 
appear to possess the same dear associations, — she had had no 
female relation to call for them ; but we trace how her memory 
lingered with the dead, and how lonely she felt amid the living 
in the simple fact of the names given to her sons. 

The awakening intelligence, the infant caresses of her children. 


218 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


were Mariamne’s only sources of joy. She probably looked tc 
her boys once more to raise the Asmonsean name, and renew the 
national glory of Judea; and had she lived to rear them from 
infancy to youth, to instil within them the nobility of race and 
faith which she felt and manifested herself, Judea would have 
wept their deaths still more. As it is, though Aristobulus could 
have been little more than six when his mother died, we can 
trace in the after-history of both the young men the lofty bear- 
ing and proud virtues hereditary to their mother’s race — even 
though their Roman education must have deadened every infant 
impression of their peculiar religion and their holy land. Four 
years after Herod’s injurious conduct towards herself, Mariamne 
was called upon to mourn the death of her last male relative, the 
harmless and aged Hyrcanus. Whether or not Alexandra’s 
intrigues had really urged the old man to such measures as gave 
Herod a pretence for ordering his execution, or whether the plot 
were Herod’s own, only to get rid of one whose claims to the 
crown he still seemed to fear, cannot now be correctly ascertained. 
The indolent character of Hyrcanus gives some color to the 
latter supposition ; the intrigues and restless spirit of Alexandra 
authorize the former. From whatever cause, the loss to Mari- 
amne w T as the same, and it widened the breach between her 
heart and her husband. The freedom enjoyed by Hyrcanus, 
and the respect, at his first accession, proffered to him by Herod, 
who gave him lodging at the palace, and board at the king’s 
table, had probably given Mariamne many opportunities of 
enjoying the old man’s society, and bound her to him still more 
closely than their consanguinity. She could not have believed 
the charges brought against him, nay, most probably knew that 
they were false, and traced their contrivance to her ambitious and 
ever scheming husband, beholding in them yet another proof of 
Herod’s resolve to crush every remnant of her race. She had 
not, however, long to indulge in grief. Herod was, at this period, 
anxious to conciliate the youthful conqueror of Antony, Octavius 
Caesar, who was then at Rhodes ; and trembling, as usual, lest 
the popular love for the Asmomeans should snatch the home 
government from his hands, and give it to Mariamne and her 
children, lie resorted to the cruel expedient of separating his 
wife from her only treasures, placed them under the care ot‘ his 
own mother and sister, at Masada, and confined Mariamne and 
Alexandra in the fortress of Alexandrina, under charge of 

1 O 


PERIOD VI. MARIAMNE. 


219 


his treasurer Joseph, and Sohemus of Itruria, giving to the latter 
exactly the same selfish and brutal command as he had given to 
his uncle Joseph five years previously, that if his death were the 
consequence of his dangerous expedition, not only Mariam ne, but 
her mother, should die with him, and the kingdom proceed to 
his brother Pheoras, regent for his (Herod’s) sons. This com- 
mand at once proves that not love, but ambition, and hatred cf 
the Asmonsean race, were his real motives, not only at the second 
time, but at the first. There was now no Antony in such power 
as to unite himself with the wife of his victim. Octavius Cjesar 
was no character for the terror of such an alternative. Besides, 
if it were only his love (so called) which could not bear its 
object to survive him, why command the death of Alexandra 
also ? It is clear throughout this dark domestic history, that 
love for Mariamne individually , and hatred of her as an Asmo- 
nsean, whose claims to the throne of her people were continually 
endangering his own, were ever at such fierce internal war, that 
he could never define from which of these contending passions the 
motives of his actions sprang ; and the historians are therefore 
equally obtuse, giving often to love of the woman, what was in 
fact nothing but hatred of the race. 

There is no proof more convincing of her right to the throne 
which Herod occupied, than his determination that she should 
never survive him to enjoy it ; love held his hand while he coaid 
revel in her exceeding loveliness, but when she could no longer 
be his, she was to share the fate of all her race. 

Josephus is amusingly astonished that Mariamne could feel no 
affection for her husband ; and quite blames her for not dissem- 
bling her dislike. We should feel very grateful to any one who 
would bring forward a single instance in Mariamne’s hapless life 
where love for Herod on her part was even possible, or what 
single proof he ever gave of his exceeding love for her. We 
will not again refer to sufferings on which we have already 
dilated; but ask if separation from the only beings she had 
loved on earth, and such imprisonment in a well-garrisoned 
fortress, as utterly prevented all exercise of power, and privileges 
of rank which she had enjoyed, were any striking proof of con- 
jugal regard ? In Herod’s previous absence he had had at least 
the grace to associate his wife with his uncle in the government, 
[n this, Josephus expressly tells us “ that they had no power 
over anything, either of others, or of their own affairs and this 


220 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


he need not have written, unless conscious that they both had 
the right and the will to execute authority. 

do some characters, the injury of placing her children under 
any care but her own, would have swallowed up all othef 
emotions. But Mariamne was no ordinary woman, do her 
heart it was not only maternal suffering : the cruel deprivation 
of her privileges was in direct disregard of the customs and 
habits of her people, who, in every stage of their eventful history, 
gave to mothers, and mothers only, the education of both 
sons and daughters. It was an insult as well as a source of 
personal suffering, aggravating not lessening the degradation of 
imprisonment. Had her children been still with her, she would 
not have regarded her residence at Alexandria as anything 
more than a measure of security. But when she felt herself 
deprived of a privilege granted to the meanest of her subjects, so 
watched and guarded, that she had scarcely the liberty of care- 
less speech ; was it marvel, was it out of nature, that her proud 
\smonaean blood deepened the injured feelings of the wife and 
mother, and that from that hour she made no further efforts to 
love her husband ? 

Yet still, true to the beautiful dignity of her womanly charac 
ter, Mariamne descended to neither intrigue nor revenge. Her 
winning beauty and graceful manner, so fascinated all who 
approached her, even her keepers, creatures strong in Herod’s 
confidence and favor, that had she ever attempted to obtain her 
rights by an appeal to the people, there does not seem a doubt 
that she would ultimately have obtained them; all Herod’s 
magnificence in building, in connexion with foreign potentates, 
had not made him popular. He was endured far more for his 
Asmonaean wife than for himself, and hundreds, aye thousands, 
amidst the Jewish people would have flocked round Mariamne, 
had she but uplifted her standard in opposition to the authority 
of Herod. But she was far too essentially and exquisitely 
feminine, to plunge the nation into renewed war and misery for 
her sake; far too truly noble, to make her private anguish 
a theme of publicity and blood, or reveal to others, save Herod’s 
self, the loss of affection which his acts had caused. We never 
hear a syllable of complaint or reproach, save boldly and 
openly to himself. Her character changed not an atom of its 
gentle dignity, its forbearing endurance. Naught of irritation, 
sourness, or that consciousness of injury , which some women love 


PERIOD VI. MARIA MNE. 


221 


to reveal, as proving them martyrs, marks her conduct. Sorrow 
could not make her selfish ; painful as it is, when the heart is 
aching in its own unceasing anguish, to think of pleasing others 
even by daily words and common manner, yet even in this lowly 
duty she did not fail. 

Sohemus, like her previous guardian Joseph, was unable 
to retain the cruel command of Herod, when in presence of its 
intended victim. Though at first stern, and resolved to remain 
faithful to his master, his determination faded away before the 
fascination of Mariamne, who, without any effort on her own 
part, won every heart that still retained the emotions of 
humanity. Even Josephus’s prejudiced and contradictory 
account absolves Mariamne from any undue influence over 
Sohemus. He was evidently at first led to shrink from obeying 
Herod’s injunction, simply from the unfailing gentleness of her 
manner in their daily intercourse. Then, imagining that Herod 
w r ould not obtain the confirmation of his authority from Caesar, 
he became anxious to conciliate the queen ; convinced that if 
she did survive her husband, “she would give him abundant 
recompense” for his fidelity to herself — for she could not be 
overlooked in the settling of the government, as she must either 
reign herself, or be very near those that reigned. He hoped 
also, that his informing her of the charge intrusted to him and 
of his determination at all hazards to disobey — would obtain him 
favor even if Herod did return, by Mariamne’s influence obtain- 
ing for him some honorable post. 

This conviction that Mariamne must reign herself in case of 
Herod’s death, or be very near those that did, meaning her sous, 
in preference to their elder half-brother Antipater, proves in 
what light she was in reality regarded by the people in general, 
and confirms our supposition, that had she been constituted like 
her intriguing mother and so raised the banner of revenge 
and revolt, she would have found very many to support 
her cause. It tells us, too, that her being a female in no way 
interfered with her right of heritage in the estimation of her 
people ; and this is an important evidence of woman’s social 
position at that period. 

The information of Sohemus could scarcely have been unex- 
pected, though it could not fail to- alienate Mariamne from 
Herod yet more. Her mother, too, was to share her fate : the 
tyrant was not content with one victim. How was it possible 


222 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


she could regard his professions of affection as meaning aught 
but hypociisv and guile? How trust to them, when it was so 
clearly evident that he would never rest till every scion of hei 
race had been cut off? How must her fond heart have clung to 
the recollection of her children, thus doomed to be snatched 
from them ! And leaving them to such a father ! If we reflect 
but deeply on her position, we surely cannot agree with Milrnan 
as to the difficulty of deciding “ what ought to have been her 
feelings and her conduct.” 

Herod returned — crowned with success. Octavius Caesar 
had confirmed him in possession of Judea — accepted his friend 
ship, and dismissed him with distinguished honors. The home 
affairs of Judea had prospered, and, seeking Mariamne, he 
revealed his unexpected success with an exultation and rejoicing 
which could find little response in the heart he addressed. She 
listened to him calmly, coldly — it might be haughtily. The 
time had passed, when, as in their former interview, she could 
appeal to him, and inquire if the order of her death in case of 
his, were indeed proof of love. Those simple words had caused 
the death of one individual whose only crime was fidelity to her- 
self, and the imprisonment of her mother, who, though generally 
intriguing, had in this instance offended in nothing save in being 
the wife and mother of Asmonaeans. How might she speak 
them again? Yet how could her noble spirit stoop to the 
semblance of interest and affection, when Herod’s own deeds 
had alienated both ? It was impossible — and with calm and 
proud indifference, she received him ; and so treated him thence- 
forward. That there was imminent danger in this line of con- 
duct, no doubt she knew ; but her mind was not one to stoop to 
deceit for preservation. Ilad she concealed her sentiments of 
dislike, she would have failed in the beautiful truth which 
encircles her as a halo. No conjugal duty could have demanded 
this concealment. There may be some to think that under all 
insult, all oppression, all injustice, she should have remembered 
that she was a wife, and in duty bound to submit to her hus- 
band. We answer, that, as a wife, she never failed in duty ; she 
could have appealed to the Jewish law, and have demanded a 
divorce; she could have returned his underhand measures 
against her life and happiness, by equally undermining his, both 
publicly and privately ; she might have sought solace for her 
domestic misery and personal gratification in pleasures of doubt 


PERIOD VI. MARIAMNE. 


223 


ful tendency, which, in that dark stormy period, and laxity of 
morals, would have passed unnoticed; but Mariamne was 
a Jewish wife, a Jewish mother; and so, unsullied by even the 
passing breath of such dark thoughts, she failed not either in 
fidelity or allegiance. She endured without one murmur, one 
struggle to ameliorate her misery ; but her truth would have 
been sacrificed, had she treated the human author of her trials 
as if she could give him love, or believe in his. 

Her coldness roused Herod’s contending passions of love and 
hate almost to madness. The one repeatedly urged him 
to violent measures against her; the other restrained him, 
fearing by her death to inflict deeper misery upon himself than 
upon her. No profession, no effort on his part, could change her 
dignified and quiet manner to the demonstration of love, for 
which his strange spirit seemed to long. Her presence bowed 
him, monster as in reality he was, under the influence of over- 
whelming love for her individually ; her absence changed 
this feeling into as overwhelming a hate for her as an Asmo- 
naean, who dared insult him by an assumption both of dignity 
and coldness — the first of which his secret conscience admo- 
nished him was natural to her rank and race, and the latter 
deserved by his own deeds in the ruthless murder of her grand- 
father, father,* and brother. 

Now, then, was the opportunity for which Salome had 
so long waited. Though foiled four years previous, her envy 
and hatred had not diminished, but, hoarded in her own 
evi. heart, imparted only to her mother, who was her ready 
adjunct, were ready to pour forth as a poisonous torrent, 
the first mcment that she could gain her brother’s ear. 
Already half maddened by his contending passions, Herod 
listened eagerly, and heard such specious tales of calumny 
and shame as excited his jealousy of herself, in addition to his 
hatred of her race. Still he could not proceed against her, 
though every lying tale in his distorted fancy was confirmed by 
her proud coldness towards himself. Each week increased 
the evil. His ill-regulated fitful mind and temper — the fierce 
strife of opposing, but equally violent passions — the one inflamed 
to madness, from the malignant whisperings of his serpent 

* Though the father of Mariamne did not fall by Herod’s own hand oj 
command, he was supposed to have had a principal share in his death. 


224 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


sister — the other heightened, fired bj the sight of that soul-sub 
duing beauty which shone forth in its cold resplendence, 
unwarmed by a single ray towards him — all raged within, 
and at length so furiously, that he was on the point of 
proceeding to extremities, to the gratification of Salome, when 
the evil was postponed. 

No domestic passions ever seemed to interfere with his public 
ambition. Hearing that Antony and Cleopatra were both dead, 
and Caesar conqueror of Egypt, he hastened to meet him there, 
leaving his family affairs in their present turbulent condition, 
and without, as usual, leaving any charge concerning his 
wife. It was when setting out on this journey that Mariamne 
recommended Soheraus (no doubt at his own entreaty) to 
Herod, asking for him a place in the government, tthich 
was granted. She could appeal for one who had acted 
faithfully towards herself and children, though she would ask no 
favor, no privilege for herself. 

Nothing but prosperity awaited Herod in all his foreign 
concerns. Octavius Caesar not only received him as his 
personal friend, but richly increased his monarchical dominions. 
The dominions of Gadara, Hyppos, and Samaria — the cities 
of Gaza, Anthedon, Joppa, and Strabo’s Tower, all commanding 
extensive maritime commerce, were made over to him by 
the emperor; and after attending Caesar as far as Antioch, 
Herod returned to his own capital, flushed with success, 
and more imperious than ever. 

Still, though every throb of ambition seemed fulfilled, Herod 
could not be satisfied. While earnestly pursuing his career of 
individual power, all the inward torments of jealous hate 
and jealous love subsided, but were recalled with redoubled 
violence on his return. The emperor of the world called 
him friend, and treated him as such. Other foreign potentates 
courted, flattered, paid him homage. A monarchy larger 
and more independent than had belonged to any of the 
former kings of Judea, acknowledged him as king; and 
its millions of inhabitants were obedient and peaceful through 
terror, if not through love. And still one woman heart refused 
him the homage of love and reverence which he demanded 
—refused to disgrace and humble her own noble Asmonaeao 
name by acknowledging him rightful sovereign of Judea. So 
at least, on mature reflection, it appears that Herod’s own con 


PERIOD VI. MARIAMNE. 


225 


science regarded her conduct. Had she given him the love he 
demanded, he would have accepted it as a tacit acknowledg- 
ment of his supremacy ; but the unwavering coldness of 
her manner, the noble bearing, throwing an air of princely 
dignity over her simplest action— the calm indifference with 
which she regarded his exaltation, all betrayed, that over 
her soul he could have no power, either by love or hate : and, 
therefore, the mortification of feeling himself, in spite of his 
power, his magnificence, his severity, actually despised by 
a weak and delicate female whom he would have crushed 
a hundred times, had not his consuming passion for her exceed 
ing loveliness held his hand, heightened his jealous passion 
to a pitch of madness which embittered every moment of 
his life. 

So some months passed, nearly a year, from his last command 
which Sohemus had betrayed. Salome and Cypros continued 
their poisonous intrigues, their enmity receiving hot increase 
from its apparent utter impossibility to chafe the collected 
spirit of their victim. That her penetrative mind beheld their 
designs is most probable, and also that holding them in 
most supreme contempt, her manner increased in haughtiness 
towards them. Mariamne had never been taught to conquer, 
or even to know the natural failings of her race. If she 
had, she would not have aggravated enmity, though she might 
not have averted it. She would not have stooped to feign 
a friendship she could not feel ; but she would have avoided all 
occasions to give offence. But to one educated as herself 
this was not easy. Her very hatred of the insidious conduct 
unfailingly practised towards her by Cypros and Salome, 
naturally increased the contempt which their Idumsean birth 
had originally excited. She no doubt knew the danger which 
this enmity threatened : but fear was as much unknown to the 
females as to the males of the Asmonaean line. That she 
treated them with undue haughtiness, and may even have 
spoken of them with the contempt she felt, is not unlikely. 
We have no wish to exalt our hapless ancestress into the 
paragon of perfection which some writers create their heroines ; 
but this we will assert, her failings were those of her education, her 
virtues intrinsically her own, and so far superior in number and in 
brightness to her faults, that combined as they are with her severe 
and unmerited sufferings, we can only think of them, and love 


226 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


her for their sakes. The fierce flames of hate which had Deet 
smothered so long, at length burst. Every preparation, in case 
of such an opportunity, had long been made by Salome. The 
train, as it were, lay only waiting for the kindling match. 

In one of his paroxysms of love, Herod one day sent for 
Mariamne, and endeavored by lavish caresses and passionate 
professions to draw from her a similar return ; but he sought in 
vain. Roused at length from her wonted calm endurance, 
anable to restrain the agony of recollection, deepened as it was 
by such false professions of a love which his every act denied, 
she demanded how she could love one whose ambition and 
reckless cruelty had caused alike her brother and her grandfa- 
ther to be slain, and heaped misery and degradation upon her 
family and herself? Enraged beyond all forbearance, Herod 
would have committed personal violence on his wife, but 
appears to have been again restrained by her still subduing 
beauty. But his chafed spirit so raged and stormed, that Salome 
paused no longer. Mariamne had scarcely left the apartment, 
before his cup-bearer entered, and with every appearance of 
agitation informed him that the queen had bribed him with 
many presents to administer a love-potion, the composition of 
which he knew not, and fearing what its effects might be, had 
resolved, as the safest course, on communicating the whole tc 
the king. 

Already more than usually enraged, and glad of any charge 
wherewith to proceed against Mariamne, the king instantly com- 
manded her most faithful eunnch to be seized and tortured, 
knowing that the queen could have done nothing without his 
aid. The man, in bis extremity of agony, never alluded to the 
charge for which he was tortured ; but allowed, that so far as 
he knew, the dislike borne by his mistress to the king had been 
occasioned by something which, during Herod’s absence, Sohe- 
mus Lad said to her. Again the same fearful belief of treachery 
and dishonor, which had actuated his conduct towards his uncle 
five years before, took possession of his heart and mind, and this 
time with still more fearful effects. Mariamne’s petition for 
Bohemus probably heightened the conviction of her guilt, and 
prevented all delay. Sohemus was seized and slain without 
even being informed of his offence, or being enabled to exculpate 
the queen by his denial of the charge. Mariamne herself, sum 
Bvaale A {before judges of Herod’s own selection, was tried on th* 


PERIOD VI. MARIAMNE. 


22 ? 


accusation of her husband — -seme historians say of adultery ; but 
the words of Josephus are these : — “ He allowed his wife to take 
nor trial, and got together those that were most faithful to him , 
and laid an elaborate accusation against her for this love-potion 
and composition , which had been charged upon her by way of 
calumny only.” Now this is convincing to me that he did not 
accuse her of adultery, knowing that if he did so, she might 
demand, and he dared not have refused, the trial of the wateis 
of jealousy, expressly provided by the mercy of the Eternal foi 
such emergencies. It was an unchanged statute of her people, 
as much her right then as it had been that of her ancestress in 
centuries past. Again, the judges themselves, however terrified 
at the wrath of the king, dared not have pronounced her guilty 
of adultery, without positive proofs of her crime, at the mouth 
of more than one witness. The intemperate rage of Herod had 
so far acted against himself, that the death of Sohemus pre- 
vented his appearance in treachery and falsehood, if he had 
been so inclined to inculpate the victim. For substantiating the 
charge of attempted assassination through the love-potion, how- 
ever, Herod could easily obtain tools. The same heart and 
hand which had already kindled the brand, was still there to 
nurse it into a wide-spreading flame. The creatures of her 
schemes were ready to do the bidding of their sovereign. Once 
in Salome’s power, it was easy to complete the deed. Herod’s 
phrensy prevented all correct judgment : and if for the words, 
“ got together those that were most faithful to him,” we read, 
“ got together all those that were ready to swear away their 
own souls, if by so doing they could oblige their mistress Salome, 
and compass the death of Mariamne,” we may chance to obtain 
the only correct rendering of the sentence. 

Before such judges, and against such witnesses, what would 
innocence avail ? Josephus does not give us the particulars of 
the trial ; but from the queen’s conduct on her way to execu- 
tion, we may suppose her demeanor when in presence of her 
judges. A dignified composure, a calm denial of the charge, 
were the only words which probably paused those lips which 
falsehood had never tarnished. She was innocent — innocent 
alike of the charge accused, and the charge implied ; for no 
doubt, though adultery was not made the reason of the trial, for 
the reasons stated above, they sought to cover her with the 
implication of dishonor ; and innocence, in such awful hours, in 


228 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


truth is strength. It will not always support us through 
lingering years of misery, of being shunned by our fehows, 
because accused of deeds we have no power to prove are false ; 
but God Himself has mercy then, and when the frame dwindles 
from a breaking heart, takes us to His Heaven, to enjoy an 
eternity of blessedness for a period of woe. 

On the threshold of that eternity, Mariamne stood ; and no 
thought of the opinion of man could disturb the tranquillity 
with which innocence strengthened her to look on death. She 
must long have expected this. From the hour of her brother’s 
murder, disclosing as it did the true character of Herod, and 
his fixed resolve to exterminate the Asmonaean line, she must 
have anticipated for herself a similar fate. She had faced it, as 
impending for five years; and the noble spirit which had 
enabled her, during that interval, so calmly to regard it, as 
never to waver in the line of strict integrity, or even by word or 
sign to lower the dignity of her character and race, would not 
forsake her at its termination. 

The mockery of justice enacted by that iniquitous trial, 
Josephus himself proves. Creatures of Herod, his will was 
theirs, and their sentence his. “ Accordingly when the court 
was at length satisfied that he was so resolved , they passed the 
sentence of death upon her.” There is not a syllable as to their 
own conviction, or their own judgment, nor the wherefore of their 
sentence, except the resolution of the king — not a word as to the guil t 
of the prisoner. Still Herod shrank in his selfish passion from losing 
her entirely. He remanded the sentence of death for one of 
perpetual imprisonment. But dreading that, if permitted to live 
even now, every scheme for her destruction would fall to the 
ground, Salome and her party never rested, till by dint of alarm 
ing the ambition of the king, they obtained the order for her 
execution. Here, again, we penetrate the passion which 
divided Herod’s heart with the opposing element of love. It 
was not by bringing forward the chances of her again dishonor- 
ing him, or her becoming the property of another, with which 
Salome now endeavored to work upon her brother, but by art- 
fully suggesting, that were she permitted to live, there was 
always danger of the multitude’s revolting, releasing her from 
prison, and making her sovereign in his stead ; for such is evi- 
dently the meaning of Josephus’s words; and not, as a mere 
hasty reading might suppose, that the people were so enraged 


PERIOD VI. — MARIAMNE. 


22S 


against her, that they would be tumultuous if she were suffered 
to live. This is contrary to both history and reason. We 
know that Herod was not so much beloved, that the multitudes 
should be enraged against an attempted assassin, by the simple 
fact that conspiracies were continually forming against him — 
men forming in bodies by some means to compass his death. 
Ilis very race, as well as liis public measures and private charac- 
ter, were odious ; whereas Mariamne was almost idolized, alike 
for herself, and as being the last representative of a race so long 
beloved. A very little reflection on these facts will, I think, be 
convincing, that the above analysis of Salome’s arguments is 
founded on reason. 

The order for the execution of the queen was at leLgth issued, 
and Mariamne prepared for it with the same calm intrepidity 
as she had faced it years before. Yet who can refuse sympathy 
in this undeserved fate for one so innocent, so lovely, and still 
so young, that she could barely have exceeded five and twenty 
years ? Nor was she entirely without ties, binding her with 
silvery links to earth, fraught with anguish and trial as it was. 
All whom she had loved with a girl’s and woman’s fondness, 
had either fallen in death, or by their dark deeds annihilated 
every capability of affection ; but others had arisen, to concen- 
trate on them a heart clinging in its desolation to them, even 
yet more closely, more devotedly, than ordinary love. How 
might she leave her infant children ? Who on earth was to 
care for them ? Would not the same persevering hatred poison 
their young existence as it had her own ? To whom did she 
leave them — Herod, Salome, Cypros ? Would they supply her 
place ? And her own mother ? Alas ! she must have already 
learned that she, too, was not one on whom her heart could rest, 
or to whom she could intrust treasures far more precious than 
herself; and in the brief interval stretching between her and 
death, she vras to feel this yet more agonizingly — the last drop of 
bitterness flung into her cup was thrown by a mother’s hand ! 
It was not then the mere separation by her own violent death 
from her beloved ones. Thoughts of far deeper anguish must 
have occupied some of her parting moments. Nor is this, as we 
shall, no doubt, be accused, taking too great license, and allow- 
ing imagination to usurp the unvarnished tale of history. We 
never refuse the meed of sympathy to Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane 
Grey, Mary Queen of Scots, and other sufferers of more modern 


230 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


times ; yet, compared with the unsullied purity of MariairmG. 
the first of these was unredeemably guilty, and the last burden* 
ed by many historians with a charge (which, though we ourselves 
believe it a false and most unproved one, still attaches itself to 
her name) of a husband’s murder. In point of innocence, the 
second only can be named with her ; and sad as was her fate, 
it was little removed from joy, compared to the trials and death 
of Mariamne. If we give these three our sympathy — if we teach 
the young heart to feel for them — if the tale of Anne’s parting 
from her own Elizabeth, and remorse for her neglect of Mary, 
excite our sympathy — why shall we hurry over the memoirs of 
our own, and refuse them the meed of admiration, love, and pity, 
which, if w r e reflect, even their brief unsatisfactory records in 
Jewish history must excite ? Let any wife and mother place 
herself in idea in the position of the Asmonsean princess ; or il 
this be too fanciful for her imagination, let her suppose hei 
nearest and dearest relatives injured alike openly and secretly 
by the man she has married, and whom she could have loved 
— herself insulted, doubted — treated at one time with furious 
love, at others imprisoned, and in danger of her life from the 
same being — and then accused, condemned, without hope of 
justice or relief — let her ponder on this ; and if she be a mother 
say where her last thoughts would rest, and then accuse us, if 
she can, of so infusing history with imagination, as to render it 
impossible to divide the one from the other. Is human nature, 
human feeling, different now to what it was in former ages ? 
Shall we deprive the characters of history of all power of emotion, 
only because they existed under a different modification of social 
customs ? If so, and we are not to exercise either reflection, 
analysation, or intellect, history must remain the bare recital of 
events and dates, of which so many justly complain, and from 
which nc lesson, no moral, car. be deduced. 


PERIOD VI. MARIAMNE. 


23 J 


CHAPTER IX. 

MARIAMNE (CONCLUDE d) A LEXAKDR A S A L C MS. 

Josephus is silent both as to the period elapsing between 
Mariamne’s trial and her death, and as to the manner of that 
execution. Stoning had originally been the Jewish penalty for 
all crimes ; but the Roman punishment of decapitation had very 
probably taken its place, and by the axe, no doubt, the last of 
the Asm on seans fell. 

Whatever the death, no doubt attends the last moments of 
the victim. Calmly, unflinchingly, we are told, she walked to 
the place of execution. No terror, no unseemly indignation at 
the injustice dealt her, marred the modest and tranquil dignity 
which had marked her life, and left her not in death. There 
she was, in her touching youth and exquisite beauty, accused 
of crimes, which not one of those vast multitudes who looked on 
believed, though none dared tempt the tyrant’s wrath by rising 
in her cause. Not a sound broke the awful stillness — the very 
emissaries of Salome, scattered in large numbers amongst the 
crowds to silence the faintest semblance of murmuring or pity, 
appear to have been awed by the dignified composure of the 
prisoner, and horror-struck, even as the rest of the spectators, by 
the sudden appearance of Alexandra, not, as might be supposed, 
to lament and mourn over her child, but to heap upon her 
reproaches and abuse, declaring “ that her punishment came 
justly upon her for her ingratitude to her husband, and her 
insolent behavior in not making proper returns to him who had 
oeen their common benefactor.” The motives of this fearful 
hypocrisy, terror for herself, and the consequent desire to avert 
all personal danger from Herod, by publicly condemning her 
child, whom she above all persons knew to be innocent, appear 
to have been penetrated, even at that moment, by the multitudes, 
and excited their loudest condemnation; but no word of 
reproach or suffering escaped the lips of her whom a mother 
thus assailed. Yet how bitter must have been the pang 
of such unexpected conduct. Uow fearfully must the cold 


2n 2 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


selfishness which could, at such a moment, seek personal security 
by asserting belief in the guilt of her own child, whom she knew 
to be unstained, have sunk on the heart of the prisoner ! But 
all human emotions had been stilled — she was standing on the 
threshold of that glorious eternity, which to her, as a woman of 
Israel, a descendant of priests, was revealed in all its fulness, all 
its bliss. A brief, brief pang, and she knew she should be with 
the idolized brother of her youth, whose angel spirit might even 
at that moment be hovering near her, to waft her released soul 
to the footstool of her God. For Israel death had no terror — 
immortality was to them revealed. They knew that with God 
was the fulness of joy, and at His right hand were everlasting 
pleasures. And in the calm fortitude, the meek endurance yet 
lofty bearing of the Asmongean princess, we read, not the 
stoicism of the Roman martyr, but the rejoicing faith and 
unshrinking courage of the Hebrew believer, firm in the blessed 
consciousness of Immortality and Heaven ! 

One look of pitying forgiveness fell from the eyes of the 
injured, on her unnatural mother, and a few words addressed to 
those near her expressed the deep concern for Alexandra’s 
degradation. Not for its injury towards herself, but as it 
• concerned her mother individually, exposing her, as it did, to 
the contempt of the populace, and little likely to conciliate the 
king. These appear to have been her last words ; “ for herself,” 
Josephus continues, “she went to death with an unshaken 
firmness of mind, and without even changing the color of her 
face, and thereby discovered the nobility of her descent to the 
spectators, even in the last moments of her life.” 

We do not think that “ nobility of descent” is or was the real 
lesson derived from such a death. It was the calm intrepidity 
of innocence — the composed and gentle firmness of a soul at 
peace with itself, and resting on its God. She had lived long 
enough to learn, and feel too sadly, that not in this world may 
we “ distinguish between the righteous and the wicked, between 
him that serveth God and him that serveth Him not ;” and, the 
pangs of parting from her children once subdued, she gladly 
turned to that everlasting home where her innocence was known, 
where her wearied spirit would find its yearned-for rest, and her 
desolate heart, which earth had crushed, be filled with love 
infinite as perfect, bliss unendiug as complete. 

We have endeavored to make manifest throughout tbii 

O 


PERIOD VI. — MARIAM HE. 


233 


eventful history, how mistaken and contradictory are the 
impressions with which Josephus would burden the character 
of Mariamne. Whereas Salome, whose actions it is utterly 
impossible to misunderstand, and whose dark thoughts and sinful 
machinations are distinctly visible, from the moment she appears 
on the theatre of life to the end of her existence, he dismisses 
without a shadow of blame, either written or implied. Thus 
leaving the idea, that trifling errors of education, the only faults 
which can be applied to Mariamne, are, because visited with 
Buffering and death, infinitely more culpable and heinous than 
the palpable and uncalled-for crimes of calumny, false witness, 
murder, and a long list of atrocities, either actually performed 
by Salome herself, or planned and committed by her sole orders 
and persuasions, but whose blackness becomes white in the eyes of 
the historian, through the marvellous transformation of temporal 
elevation and success. Surely, we ought to be careful how we place 
such opinions in the hands of our children, and not rest contented 
with merely giving them history to peruse. As an author, Jose- 
phus is most valuable ; we have no doubt of his accuracy with 
regard to events, but we cannot depend upon either his discrimi- 
nation or impartiality in the delineation of character, or in the 
justice and entireness of his conclusions. We repeatedly find 
that his drawing up, as it were, of a character, is contradicted 
by the whole tenor of previous events, which, being related by 
himself as facts, must guide us much more correctly than his 
own conclusions. We have seen this already in the life and 
character of Alexandra; and we shall perceive it as clearly in 
his winding up of the character of Mariamne, which we subjoin : 

“ And thus died Mariamne ; a woman of excellent character 
both for chastity and greatness of soul ; but she wanted 
moderation, and had too much contention in her nature. Yet 
had she all that can be said, in the beauty of her body, and her 
majestic appearance in conversation; and thence arose the 
greatest part of the occasions, why she did not prove so agree- 
able to the king, nor live so pleasantly with him as she might 
otherwise have done, for while she was most indulgently used 
by the king, out of his fondness for her, and did not expect that 
he could do auy hard thing to her, she took too unbounded a 
liberty. Moreover, that which afflicted her was, what he had 
done to her relations, and she ventured to speak of all they had 
suffered by him ; and at last great! v provoked both the king’s 


234 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


mother and sister, till they became enemies to her, and even h$ 
himself also did the same, on whom alone she depended for hei 
expectations of escaping the last of punishments.” 

Now we would ask any casual reader, what would be the 
impression of this extraordinary passage ? Would they not sup- 
pose that Mariamne had not only drawn down her fate upon 
herself, but had actually deserved" it ? That she was the only 
one to blame, and Herod, Cypros, and Salome, all alike were 
guiltless? And yet, even in leaving this most unfounded and 
most unjust impression, of what does he accuse her ? Com- 
pelled (it would seem almost in spite of himself) to acknowledge 
her chastity and greatness of soul, all he can bring against her 
is, that her “ majestic appearance in conversation ” (meaning, we 
imagine, the calm dignity of her manner) rendered her less 
agreeable to the tyrant than she would have been could she 
have resembled her mother, and condescended to deceive. We 
are told that “ she was most indulgently used by the king, who 
out of his great fondness for her could do no hard thing to her, 
and that, therefore, she took too great a liberty, wanted modera- 
tion, and evinced too contentious a spirit.” Where throughout 
her history, and we have given it at length, can we find the 
foundation for either of these clauses ? How did Herod demon- 
strate his deep love and great indulgence ? By the murder of 
her brother and grandfather, the constant indignity offered to 
her mother, the death of all those who befriended or were faith- 
ful to her; or by the continued insults offered to herself, in 
doubting her truth commanding her imprisonment and separa- 
tion from her children, twice sentenced to death in case of 
Heroc’s death, and final execution on a false and unproved 
charge ? Where can we find proofs of her want of moderation, 
<fec. ? In her calm endurance of her constant sufferings ? In 
her breathing not one syllable of complaint or injury, forming no 
plots, joining no intrigues, passing through her brief life in such 
unstained, unsullied purity and chastity, that not even the most 
prejudiced can dare fling a stigma on her noble name ; exposed 
times out of number to temptation from the machinations of an 
evil mother, and the insults of a phrensietl husband, yet eschew- 
ing all, and standing forth in her own brightness ; before which 
neither slander, hatred, nor calumny, could stand ? We read 
how impossible Salome felt it to compass her death on the plea 
&f her dishonor bv the artifice of the love-potion, which in th« 


PERIOD VI. M A R I A U N E . 


235 


end she was compelled to adopt. In what can we discover too 
contentious a spirit? In the high-minded uprightness which 
revealed to the injurers, and to the injurers alone, her conscious- 
ness of their evil intentions towards her ? In the absence of all 
deceptive conciliation, and yet the avoidance of all attempted 
vengeance ? In what took she too unbounded a liberty ? We 
read, of her asking no boon save one, and that was Sohemus’s 
own seeking. If, indeed, Herod so “indulgently used her,” and 
she was of so rapacious a disposition, is it not almost marvellous 
that history reveals not a single instance in which this unbounded 
liberty was used; that Mariamne should never have accused 
Salome and Cypros to the king, and urged his interference to 
prevent their injurious treatment of herself : that we do not read 
of her interfering also in the government, in foreign and civil 
affairs, in which other women, who really did take “ too 
unbounded a liberty,” were so often mischievously engaged? 
There was neither law nor custom in her nation to prevent this 
interference, had she been so inclined. 

Again, was it so very remarkable that “ what afflicted her 
most, was Herod’s conduct to her relations?” Yet Josephus, 
and even Milman, seem to imagine that because she was the 
murderer’s wife, she was not to feel these things. Was it in 
human nature to retain affection or even esteem for a man “ who 
had more or less concern in the murder of her grandfather, 
father, brother, and uncle,” * even could she forget and forgive 
that twice he had commanded her death in case of his own ? 
Was it a fault that “she ventured to speak of all they had 
•'uffered by him ?” Or was it not rather a proof of a noble spirit 
and courageous soul, which urged her to risk her own life, 
rather than by silence and deceit tacitly acquiesce in the neee- 
sity for their destruction ? We are told, too, that Mariamne 
“ greatly provoked both the king’s mother and sister ;” but of 
their hatred to her, and malignantly working enmity, Josephus 
takes no note, permitting us to suppose that it was deserved, and 
Mariamne, not Salome, was to blame. Haughtiness and reserve, 
then, according to this historian, are greater crimes than slander, 
false witness, and actual murder. Mariamne might have treated 
Salome and Cypros with undue haughtiness, but the fault 
originated in her education, not herself. Had she, as she might 


* Miiman. 


2;*6 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


have done, sought to injure Salome with the king, or give* 
evidence of her dislike by public insult or private annoyances, we 
might acknowledge that she was in error ; but of such things 
we can discern no trace whatever. Mariamne’s sole offence was 
having in her girlhood reproached Salome and Cypros with the 
meanness of their birth, urged on to do so most probably by 
aer designing mother ; and for this offence Salome pursued her 
with unrelenting hate, caring for neither falsehood nor murder, 
so she at length succeeded in removing her by death. We know 
that Mariamne’s original offence must have been committed 
quite in her girlhood, for, from the time of the death of Aristo- 
bulus, Salome commenced her machinations ; and, aware of her 
hate and designs against her as she must have been, was it 
strange that Mariamne, shrinking from sight of falsehood even 
in manner, should treat Salome on all occasions with a reserve 
and dignity, which her seditious and violent spirit considered as 
haughtiness and insult impossible to be borne, and so aggravat- 
ing her passionate desire for revenge ? 

Such is our dispassionate analysis of Josephus’s complex 
winding up of the character of Mariamne. We can only entreat 
our readers, old and young, to refer to the history itself, and if 
our narrative of the same events be deemed erroneous, or prove 
to have no foundation on reflection and reason, to draw thence 
their own conclusions, and pronounce judgment on the charac- 
ter of our hapbss ancestress accordingly. We wish merely to 
svggest , to assist, in the perusal of history, not to push forward 
our individual opinions in opposition to existing authorities, or 
in contradiction of established theories ; acknowledging at the 
same time boldly and freely, that having long thought neither 
Jewish nor Gentile historians have done justice to the personal 
character and the painful position of the last proud scion of the 
Asmonsean line, we were glad of this opportunity so to bring 
her forward, that our readers, perceiving little things and trifling 
events more clearly before them than they can be found in a 
history of the time, ma}' form their own conclusions. 

Long as we have already lingered, our task were scarcely 
accomplished, did we not endeavor to “ point a moral” in 
this eventful tale. Let not our young sisters turn from its 
perusal, in that sadness and sinking of the heart which must 
accompany the first conviction, that virtue, and goodness, 
and truth, are not rewarded upon earth ; that in Salome 


PERIOD VI. MARIA MNE. 


237 


they perceive guilt and crime triumphant, prosperous, rejoicing ; 
in Mariamne, the virtuous falling a victim to the sinful, 
truth crushed by falsehood, innocence by guilt; Herod living 
out his days, surrounded by temporal prosperity, power, magni- 
ficence, conquering alike foes abroad and seditions at home 
— courted by foreign potentates — allied to the empress of 
the world ; — Aristobulus the young, the innocent, the gifted, 
cut off by the dark deeds of this very man, in his first and 
loveliest youth. To the unenlightened and the sceptic, these 
are truths fraught with darkness and suffering, likely to 
lead to the fearful labyrinth of denial and atheism — neces- 
sity and nature. To the believer, be his actual creed 
what it may, so it be founded on the revelation of the Old 
Testament (which Christian as well as Hebrew is), narra- 
tives like these are some of the very strongest, most 
unanswerable evidences of our immortality which history pre- 
sents. In the history of Jeroboam, we find the foundation and 
commentary on this assertion. His young son Abijah fell 
6ick, and Jeroboam desired his wife to take a present in her 
hand, and seek Aliijah the prophet, to implore his intercession 
for the restoration of the child. The aged prophet was blind, 
and though the wife of Jeroboam concealed her rank and name, 
and sought to pass herself for another woman, the Lord revealed 
her name and mission, and Ahijah, after prophesying the awful 
calamities which would befall the house of Jeroboam for 
their iniquities, proceeded to pronounce these impressive and 
remarkable words, “ Arise thou, therefore, get thee to thine 
;wn home, and when thy feet enter into the city the child 
shall die. And all Israel shall mourn for him, and bury 
him, for he only of Jeroboam shall come to the grave , because 

IIST HIM THERE WAS FOUND SOME GOOD THING TOWARD THE 

Lord God of Israel, in the house of Jeroboam.” If 
we would but remember this striking fact, revealed as it is 
in the inspired word of the Eternal, to be our consolation 
and instruction in those darker ages, when such direct com- 
munings with our Father in Heaven were to be at an end ; 
even Profane History would strengthen us in our belief, and 
reveal many times the truth of our immortality. 

We should cease to regard death with the horror which 
its very name often inspires, if we would but realize it, not as the 


238 


1 H E WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


cessation of existence, but as the revealed entrance into another 
and purer sphere, where every intellectual capacity every capa- 
bility of love and affection, every aspiring after the great 
and good, the beautiful and true, which has blessed us here, 
will find exercise and fulfilment, completion and perfection. If 
we believe in a God, and that He is, as He revealed Himself, a 
God of truth, we must believe in our existence elsewhere, 
or this world is chaos — our God but a name, His word false. 
We could write more, much more on this argument, but this is 
not the place. Writing for professed Israelites, we must 
suppose that their belief in immortality, in death, not as a 
cessation, but as a change of existence, is as fixed as their belief 
in their Fathers’ God ; and if it be, we shall find little difficulty 
in removing all impression of doubt and sadness from the history 
of Mariamne. 

The iniquities of Judea and her children at the period of 
Herod, and some years before, far exceeded, in magnitude 
and variety, those of Israel in the time of Jeroboam. If 
we glance forward from the reign of Herod, we shall perceive 
misery increasing on every side — horrors multiplying — man 
rising against man, more appallingly, more terribly, than 
had ever before devastated this beautiful world. In addition to 
the tale of Jeroboam’s son, we are told in the same Divine 
Book, “ The righteous is taken from the evil to come." And in 
the death of Aristobulus and Mariamne, both these Divine 
Truths are fulfilled. “ There was good” found in Aristobulus ; 
and God, in His mercy,' over-ruled the wickedness of man, 
to the eternal blessedness of the youth he loved. He took him, 
ere temptation and evil could sully the purity and virtue which 
his youth revealed. Every kind of death is suffering. It is the 
penalty we all pay for the sinful inclinations inherited from our 
first parents ; but what was the agony of a violent death, 
granted it lasted an hour, compared with the eternity of bliss 
awaiting the released spirit with its pitying God ? The sin of 
Herod was the same. That the Eternal overruled his hate and 
persecution of the innocent, to the endless joy and peace of hie 
victim, in no way exonerated him from the blackness of the 
deed. Crime is crime. The worker of sin looks but to the 
triumph of his wickedness, and, as such, is responsible tc 
his God ; but his evil deeds, however .hey mav seem tc 


PERIOD VI. MARIAMNE. 


239 


sarry all before them while below, do but add a glory to 
the Divine economy above, and for those they seek to injuro 
upon earth, provide yet deeper bliss in heaven. 

As it was with Aristobulus, so it was with Mariamne. Her 
life was, indeed, one of far severer trials, far deeper agony 
than his ; but God saw she needed them to fit her for heaven, 
or they would not have been sent. There might have been 
inclinations and whisperings of evil naturally in her heart, 
which, without the trial of suffering, might have made her ano- 
ther Alexandra or Salome ; but God loved her, and so He 
purified her in the ordeal of suffering, and then in His deep 
mercy took her to Himself ere the evil days came, and she saw 
her beloved children tortured and condemned. If we look for- 
ward in the history of her family, we must feel that she was 
indeed removed from the evil to come.” The Eternal might, 
indeed, had He so willed, have “ made bare His holy arm,” and 
wrought salvation and delivery for her even on earth ; but 
to make such a distinction between the righteous and the 
wicked in this world, would interfere with the free will, to 
choose the good and eschew the evil, or choose the evil 
and forsake the good, which God himself bestowed on man. 
No; in this life, evil will often appear to be predominant ; but 
we shall cease to murmur and despond that so it is, if we 
will but look up firmly and faithfully to that world, where 
all that is incomprehensible here will be made clear, and 
the injured and the innocent live for ever with their God, shining 
as the chosen “ jewels” of His crown. 

Do not then let us envy the prosperous, and believe ourselves 
forsaken, if our sojourn on earth be one of adversity and pain. 
We have still a Father who loveth those whom He chastises, 
for by chastisement and probation He prepares them for that 
eternal blessedness which is denied to those who continue in 
their hardened course. In direct opposition to the comforting 
words we have quoted, we read in the same inspired book, 
“ When the wicked spring up like grass, and when all the 
woikers of iniquity do flourish, it is that they shall be destroyed 
for ever." And again, “ Fret not thyself because of evil doers, 
neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity, for they 
shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither like the green 
herb.” If we recollect these words, and those quoted before — 
if we believe, humbly and faithfully, that this world is actually 
22 


240 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


to the righteous but the threshold of existence, and permit this 
belief to attend us, not only in every event , but in every thought 
of life, running through our studies from the severest to the 
lightest, history would not be the sad and unsatisfactory task 
which it but too often is. We should never feel saddened and 
depressed at the often apparent triumph of oppression and evil 
over the helpless and the good, for we should know this was 
but the surface, whose depths were in infinity ; the beginning, 
whose end was immortality. 

Which of our young readers would, if she could choose, 
exchange the trials and death of Mariamne for the prosperous 
and unchecked career of Salome ? The inward answer contained 
in the first thought would reveal the real state of the heart and 
soul to their youthful owner. We ask not the reply, for none 
could truly give it. Those who know not, and have never 
studied humanity, would loudly condemn the very suspicion, 
that preference could be accorded to the career (remember we 
do not say the character) of Salome ; but the earnest and heart- 
felt student of humanity knows that the human heart of itself 
is but too often “deceitful above all things, and desperately 
wicked.” And though religion and education, vitalized by the 
grace of God, can and will subdue these natural inclinations, 
still it is only inward questions such as these which will reveal 
whether indeed every seed of evil has been trampled down and 
rooted out. And, therefore, is it good so to cultivate self- 
knowledge, that even the characters of ages past may aid us on 
through the dark and dangerous paths of our present life ! 

The sinfulness of Salome would warn us from such choice : 
but there may be many youthful hearts to think and feel, that 
to be prosperous is not always to be wicked — to pass through 
life without trial, does not always prove our non-acceptance with 
the Lord. And they are right : but our question condenses 
itself into simply this — would we choose a life of prosperity and 
joy without religion — without that internal communing with 
our Father in heaven which bids us think of, and fits us for 
heaven ; or a life of trial with it, with that religion which i ot 
only sustains but blesses — which gives us joy in the very midst of 
gref, strength in the midst of weakness, hope beyond the grave, 
m the dark shadow of death — assurances of unending love in 
loneliness, of sympathy in misconception and suspicion, of one 
who will never leave us nor torsake, however every friend depa v ta 


PERIOD VI. MIRIAMNE 


241 


by change or death, of that realization of immortality, which 
bids us walk this world as a bird that passeth, and in his very 
resting sees afar, and yearneth for his native clime. According to 
the inward answer, so are our hearts right or wrong, in their 
secret thoughts of God. 

Such were the trials, and such the infused strength cf 
Mariamne. As a woman of Israel — to whom these things were 
known and felt by the faithful, far more vividly then than now 
— we may rest assured that her pure chastity, her high sense 
of rectitude, her unvarying truth and collected dignity, in the 
very midst of trials and temptations, which in those dark times 
must have morally and spiritually lowered any ordinary woman, 
had their foundation and constancy in religion alone. Nothing 
else could have sustained her, or withheld her so completely 
from the committal of a single fault, or even venial error, which 
could throw a shadow on her name. To realize to the full the 
beauty of her character, we must think of the age in which she 
lived — the wickedness with which she w 7 as surrounded — the 
false notions of right and wrong with which her own mother 
sought to mislead her unguarded youth — the laxity of morals, 
even in Judea, from her amalgamation with the heathen nations 
— and the intensity of suffering to which as a wife and sister, 
queen and mother, she was so constantly and cruelly exposed — 
these considerations, added to her extreme youth, must excite 
our love and admiration yet more than our pity, for we know 
that her death was not only the cessation of sorrow, but the 
commencement of an eternity of bliss. “ To believe in the 
heroic make? heroes,” we have lately read ; and there is a world 
of solid truth in those brief words : and even so, to admire virtue 
with the pure fresh feelings of the unsophisticated heart, will excite 
to virtuous deeds. The trials of the wife of Herod are no longer ours 
to encounter ; but without trial who may pass through life ? And 
oh, however deceived, insulted, wearied, let us never stoop to 
use the weapons of revenge, but calmly and steadily pursue 
our suffering course, as pure, as true, as nobly, as Mariamne! 

Before entirely leaving this subject, we will take a hasty glance 
over the fate of the characters so intimately connected with the 
history of Mariamne. 

Herod’s after career will be found in the historians of the 
times — suffice it to state here, that if ever retribution were per- 
mitted to be visible in this world, we can trace it in the tortures. 


242 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


physical and mental, which afflicted him, from the moment of 
his wife’s murder, to his own death, not only as concerned him 
individually, but in the continued plots and misery which, 
through the fiendish machinations of Salome, devastated his 
household. 

A pestilential disease breaking out just after Mariamne’s 
murder, and carrying off immense numbers, appears to have 
been so universally felt as Divine vengeance and wrath for the 
iniquitous deed, that her innocence, if it had ever been doubted, 
must from that moment have been publicly acknowledged, and 
Herod regarded with increased loathing as her unjustifiable 
murderer. Overpowered by mental agony, he went from place 
to place, from solitude to solitude, in the vain search for peace. 
The body succumbed to the torture of the mind, and a fierce 
incurable disease seizing him while at Samaria, confined him 
there for several months, and without any intermission of pain. 

The mother who could insult her innocent and only child on 
her way to death — who could at such a moment think only of 
endeavoring to preserve her own life, and seek to do so by false 
accusations of her own offspring — was not likely to be much 
affected by her loss. No misfortune, no bereavement, no 
personal imprisonment, appears to have had any effect in 
decreasing that fearful thirst for ambition which was the secret 
origin of all Alexandra’s own crimes, and much of her children’s 
miseiy. Hearing of Herod’s incurable distemper at Samaria, 
she commenced her machinations by endeavoring to obtain 
possession of the fortifications of Jerusalem, in which place she 
resided. One of these commanded the Temple ; and she knew 
if this were obtained, the whole nation would be in her power ; 
for without the temple there could be no sacrifices, and without 
these daily holocausts, universal rebellion wou’d inevitably ensue. 
These strongholds she demanded in the name of Mariamne’s 
sons, on the plea of guarding them for the young princes, in case 
of their father’s death. The link, however, which bad in former 
times united the populace to Alexandra, had been snapt asunder 
by the death of Mariamne. There could be no belief in her 
fidelity to the interests of her grandsons, when her unnatural 
conduct to her own child was remembered, and she was now 
yet more an object of popular hate and indignation than Herod 
himself. Her schemes were all frustrated — first by the positive 
refusal of the governor of the fortifications to take anv step till 


PERIOD VI. MARIAMNE. 


243 


the actual death of the king ; and secondly, and still more 
effectually, by the betrayal of her machinations : and Herod, 
though scarcely able to move or breathe from physical torture, 
gave instant orders for her execution. 

The fate of Alexandra was, then, the same asMariamne’s; but 
how differently do we regard it ! Her restless intrigues, caring 
for neither sin nor shame in their accomplishment ; her fearful 
ambition always ending in destruction to the innocent, as well as 
to herself ; her entire want of all human feelings, from first to 
last, save in her grief for Aristobulus, and those, too, her after 
conduct bids us trace more to the agony of mortified ambition 
than of maternal bereavement, all compel us actually to recoil 
from the contemplation of her character, and deprive us of all 
sympathy in her fate. 

Had she been other than she was — had she taught her proud 
spirit submission, and sought to conciliate, not offend, the female 
members of Herod’s family, much of misery, both for Mariamne 
and herself, might have been averted. "VVe can derive no indi- 
vidual lesson from her history, save of warning, lest the tempta- 
tions of this world, luxury and worldliness, the petty ambition of 
rivalry in riches and appearance, prejudice and envy, should 
distort the fair sweet coloring of humanity, and clothe up our 
hearts in the icy mail of selfishness and pride. Alexandra was 
not by nature and constitution different from other women ; but 
the seeds of sin, of which circumstances and education prevent 
our very consciousness, in her obtained ascendency, and crushed 
all of human feeling and womanly tenderness, beneath their 
poisonous and overspreading weeds. 

Her intrigues and ambition, however, are strong confirmat?ry 
proofs of the social position of the Women of Israel in her time. 
We see she had full 'iberty to scheme and act, and endeavor, 
in more than one instance, to put herself forward in actual oppo- 
sition to the mighty and magnificent Herod, powerful as he was 
in himself, and courted by all foreign states. That she never 
succeeded, showed, indeed, the weakness of her cause, but not 
the debasement of her social condition. There could have been 
no law existing, either written or oral, to the disparagement 
of women at the time, or her natural position would have 
rendered her too powerless and insignificant even for the forma- 
tion of intrigues, much less to permit their importance in the 
eyes of Herod, and consequent persecution of herself. 


244 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


The mother of Herod is mentioned no more in history, and 
not being a woman of Israel, we are not even bound to follow 
Salome's sinful course any further ; but for the completion of the 
history, we will sketch briefly as may be, the continuance of her 
career. Her first public act after the death of her victim, for 
such undoubtedly Mariamne was, was in defiance of all Jewish 
law and womanly delicacy, to send a bill of divorce to her husband 
Costabarus, with whom she had quarrelled, excusing the deed to 
A Herod by telling him that it was for his sake she had thus acted ; 
having discovered that Costabarus had joined in a conspiracy 
against him, and had also preserved alive, in direct contradiction to 
Herod’s orders (issued twelve years before), the sons of Babas, 
men of the Asmonsean line, and in great favor with the multitude. 
Being found in the place designated by Salome, they were all 
slain; and Costabarus, with tour other of Herod’s intimate 
friends, executed on Salome’s charge. The sons of Babas were 
the very last even distantly connected with the Maccabsean line ; 
and Herod now reigned unencumbered with a single remaining 
family of sufficient rank and dignity to interfere with or preveut 
his denationalization of Judaea. 

Sixteen or eighteen years passed, and we read nothing of 
Salome ; but from the moment of Alexander’s and Aristobulus’ 
return to Judaea her hatred against Mariamne seemed rekindled 
towards her sons, and her machinations recommenced. The 
young princes had been educated at Rome, and were received by 
the Jewish population with such enthusiastic delight as appears 
to have reawakened the old hatred of the Asmonean line. The 
princes bore in their majestic mien and noble features, all the 
characteristics of their mother’s race. The intervening years 
seem to have had as little power to deaden the people’s love for 
their native princes as to diminish Salome’s hate. They could 
scarcely have arrived at Jerusalem ere the calumnies and sus- 
picions against them commenced, not indeed as yet conveyed to 
Herod by his sister, but reports raised abroad, that they had 
been heard to speak reproachfully against their father as their 
mother’s murderer, and boldly to assert their own belief in her 
innocence and virtue. These rumors of course reached Herod’s 
ear, and reviving all the thoughts and tortures of previous years, 
shook the affection he was beginning to feel towards his sons, and 
his naturally jealous and suspicious temper regained ascendency. 

Still, though shaken, he pursued his more kindly intentiou 


PERIOD VI. SALOME. 


245 


Cowards his sons, marrying both with great splendor, to wives 
of their own rank ; Alexander, to Glaphyra, daughter of Arclie- 
laus, king of Cappadocia, a union which, if approved of by the 
people, clearly demonstrates how completely the Laws of Moses 
were put aside or observed, according to the caprice of the king, 
and how little that power can be supposed to realize the pro- 
mises of the prophets : Aristobulus to Berenice, the daughter of 
Salome. That she should consent to give her daughter to a 
man she hated, and whose destruction she had resolved to com- 
pass, may excite some surprise, but is fully explained by the 
issue. Whether the princess Berenice’s affections were excited 
towards her husband, or not, we know not ; but even had they 
been, Salome herself was too completely void of any human or 
womanly feeling, to permit such affection to interfere with her 
designs, or care for the suffering which in that case she inflicted 
on her child. She permitted, nay, probably proposed the union, 
to obtain a spy on Aristobulus’ most private moments and most 
unguarded words ; and that Berenice could be persuaded, as 
Josephus tells us, into “ ill-nature” against her husband, and to 
“ gratify her mother forge the most improbable tales concern- 
ing her husband’s private speeches, argues but too painfully 
that the character of Salome found its reflection in her daughter ; 
and Berenice married Aristobulus not from affection, but only to 
aid her mother’s plans. 

We have no space, nor is this the work, to dilate on all the 
fearful machinations pursued by Salome and her party, against 
these ill-fated young men. The unsuspicious candor, the open 
independence, and courageous assertion of their mother’s honor, 
against all who purposely assailed it, were no match for the 
fiendish subtlety which marked every word and movement of 
Salome. They actually regarded her as their best friend, at the 
very period that her every energy was used in maddening the 
king against them, till he himself urged on their destruction 
with the violence and hatred of a demon. The law of Moses, 
totally disregarded in the condemnation of Mariamne, and the 
marriage of Alexander with a heathen, was now used by the 
infatuated father as a reason for his demanding the execution 
of his sons.* For five or seven years these machinations worked 
ere their end was accomplished by the actual destruction of the 


® Josephus, Antiquities, book xvi. chap. xi. 


246 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


victims ; and during that interval, the most awful state of sus- 
picion from one man to another, obtained possession not of the 
court alone, but of the whole population. Executions were con- 
stantly occurring. Men accused, however innocent, and tortured 
into confessions of guilt, which included many others — dark 
doubts of friend against friend — brother against brother — till 
all of nature itself and human affections appeared to succumb 
beneath the baleful influence of suspicion and distrust; and all 
this was a woman’s work, and originated in a woman’s hate, 
called forth by the petty feelings of jealousy and envy. 

In Josephus we find an elaborate, in Milman a clear and suc- 
cinct account of this fearful period of Herod’s reign. To these we 
refer our readers : suffice it here to state, that Salome’s hate was 
gratified. The gifted and accomplished sons of Mariamne shared 
their mother’s fate : and though the dark deed recoiled with 
horror and murder on many of its perpetrators, Salome herself 
remained uninjured by the shock, spared to work out her own 
destiny, and in another world receive its recompense. 

But let it not be imagined that hate and its concomitant 
desire of injury were the only characteristics of Salome ; her life 
was one continued course of intrigue, alike political and personal. 
We do not linger on them ; for there can be neither profit nor 
pleasure in so doing. Her treatment of Costabarus we already 
know ; and before she was married to Alexas, some years after- 
wards, her conduct had been such as to excite the shame and 
abhorrence of even those licentious times. Her third husband 
was Alexas, one of Herod’s favorites, and with him she appears to 
have lived more peacefully and honorably than with his prede- 
cessors. That, with all her fearful deeds and thoughts, she was 
a woman of masculine intellect and immense capability, is proved 
by the consummate skill and talent with which she always con- 
trived and carried out her nefarious plans. Often in danger, but 
never outwitted, she repeatedly saw her companions in iniquity 
fall victims to their own arts against others, while she hersel. 
remained untouched and unsuspected. None bul a clever woman 
could so have intrigued, and kept up such a continued course of 
fraud, deceit, and falsehood, without ever injuring herself. But 
how fearfully do those very talents and capabilities increase her 
responsibility and her guilt ! 

The only act recorded of her of a somewhat superior nature tc 
those we have touched upon, was her releasing from the Hippo- 


PERIOD VI. SALOME. 


247 


drome all those Jewish nobles and elders whom Herod had 
collected there, commanding them to be slain the moment of 
his own death, that there might be a general mourning in Judea, 
Before the king’s death was publicly known, Salome and Alexas 
gave them freedom, desiring them, in Herod’s name, to return 
to their own lauds. Remembering the character of Salome 
we must believe this action, like all the rest, had its origin in 
policy not in goodness. Had obedience to Herod’s command 
been equally politic, we should undoubtedly have read of their 
execution instead of their release. 

So skilfully had she contrived to retain her brother’s affections, 
that, though it was to her machinations alone he actually ow 7 ed 
all his domestic, and consequent mental misery, Herod remem- 
bered her largely in his will, leaving her the cities of Jamnia, 
Asbdod, and Phasaelis, with five hundred thousand drachmae in 
silver. To her too w 7 as intrusted his letter to the soldiery, 
thanking them for their fidelity to himself, and exhorting them 
to grant the same to his son, Arelielaus, whom he had 
appointed king. Salome read it herself to the soldiery, whom 
her commands had mustered in the amphitheatre, and the 
appointment was received with acclamations. 

But our intrigues were not yet over. A sedition in Jerusa- 
lem, soon after the accession of Archelaus, though subdued and 
punished, urged the young monarch to journey to Rome, there 
to defend his conduct, and obtain the confirmation of his 
father’s will. Thither Salome and her whole family accom- 
panied him, ostensibly to use her influence with Augustus in his 
favor, secretly to work against him, by encouraging Antipas, 
another of Herod’s sons, to come to Rome, and promising him 
her aid with the emperor to displace his brother. False charges 
were accordingly brought against Archelaus by a son of 
Salome, as subtle and intriguing as his mother; and after 
a variety of delays and pleadings, Archelaus was appointed 
by the emperor ethnarch over half the territory left him by 
Herod (a poor substitute for the title and power of king), and 
the remainder divided between two of his brothers, Philip 
and Antipas. Here again we trace the workings of Salome’s 
intrigues, paving the way for the complete reduction to a Roman 
province of that beautiful land which her brother had so 
strenuously sought to denationalize. With herself, all pros- 
pered. Besides confirming to her the legacy of her brother, 


248 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

Augustus conferred the royal residence of Askelon ; and alter 
nately here and at Rome she seems to have passed the remain* 
ing years of her existence. 

As we do not read any further record of her interference 
in the government, we are to suppose that she confined hersub- 
tilty to more private life. She lived long enough to behold the 
transient kingdom of Herod swallowed up in the dominion of 
the Romans : her nationality, her glory, her laws, all trampled 
underfoot by the heathen power that overran the land. But tc 
Salome this must have been rather a source of rejoicing than of 
grief. Judging by her acts, she never loved Judaea, nay, 
had shared her brother’s resolution to hurl it from its yroud 
supremacy as the chosen kingdom of the Lord; and this 
was done. The banishment of Archelaus gave the government 
into the hands of Roman procurators ; and two years afterwards 
Salome closed her iniquitous career, leaving all her cities to the 
empress Julia, thus confirming our assertion, that neither by 
birth nor adoption, character nor feeling, was she a daughter of 
Jerusalem. 

Glad to quit such a subject of dissatisfaction and pain, we 
leave to our readers’ own minds all reflections on the character 
of Salome, bidding them only remember that, awful as is 
the picture of female depravity, it is truth, not fiction , and 
therefore demands our serious consideration as to the origin of 
these over-spreading crimes. The seeds of wickedness are 
bo small as to be invisible, religion only can destroy them 
ere they are discovered ; and Salome knew not God. 




CHAPTER X. 

HELENA, QUEEN OF ADIABEN E. B E R E N I C E. 

Thirty years passed: the miseries of Judaea and her hapless 
people increased. The Law of Moses was still, indeed, the 
religion of the country; in some hearts pure and spiritual 


PERIOD VI. HELENA. 249 

as it had been given, in others burdened with superstition, vio- 
lence, and minutiae wholly foreign to its beautiful consistency : 
in others fast giving place to the customs and habits of the 
Romans. Darkness — moral, intellectual, and spiritual — had 
gathered over the nation as a whole. God had left them 
in His wrath to pursue their own hardened course ; but even at 
this period, when the true religion seemed fast fading from 
the earth, a ray of reviving lustre beamed exactly in confirma- 
tion of the consoling theory, that God never leaves Himself 
without witnesses upon earth. 

Helena, queen of Adiabene, a district beyond the Tigris, bad 
embraced Judaism. An independent sovereign, whose dominion 
ovei her own subjects was absolute, and whose actions owned no 
supremacy but her own will, this act must have been both 
voluntary and from conviction. It could have no ulterior 
motive in ambition, for Judaea was not only under iron subjection 
to th6 Romans, but devastated by famine and disease. Izates, 
the sou of Helena, had been sent by his father, Monobazus, 
to be educated at the court of Abenerig, king of Characene, 
a distiict on the Persian Gulf. While there, he became 
acquainted with A nanias, a Hebrew merchant, who, in his com- 
mercial character, had frequent access to the women’s apart- 
ments, and never lost an opportunity of inculcating the tenets 
of his faith. Izates, who had married the daughter of Abenerig, 
appears to have been present at these conferences, and also 
became a convert, by a curious coincidence, at the very 
time that Lis mother, Helena, embraced the religion also. So 
earnest was Izates in the cause, that, on his return to his coun- 
try, and accession, after his father’s death, he insisted on 
being received into the covenant of Abraham, against the’ 
advice of his mother, and even Ananias, who appears to have 
accompanied the young monarch as his chosen counsellor 
and friend. Izates had not the right of primogeniture to 
his father’s crown ; and knowing that he had very many 
enemies in the partisans of his brothers, Helena, though an 
earnest convert herself, feared that such a public departure from 
the religion of his country would create sedition and rebellion in 
his people. Izates at first yielded to her counsel ; but his 
inclinations receiving fresh incentive from the representations 
of Eleazar, a learned Galilaean Jew, and his own impressions of 
a frequent and earnest study of the Law of Moses, he was 


25 0 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

received into the covenant of Abraham, and no evils followed ; 
for, to use here the words of Josephus, “it was God who hin- 
dered what they feared from taking effect, and preserved 
both Izates himself and his sons from many dangers, and 
procured their deliverance when it seemed impossible, demon- 
strating thereby that the fruit of piety does not perish, for those 
who have regard for Him, and for their faith upon Him 
only.* 

But Helena’s conversion is of more importance to our present 
subject than that of Izates. Her zeal was so earnest, her faith 
so heartfelt, that, when her natural anxiety was calmed by the 
peace and prosperity which followed, her son’s profession of 
Judaism, she requested his permission to make a journey to 
Jerusalem, and worship at the holy temple there. This was, at 
that time, no trifling undertaking. Travelling was dangerous 
and fatiguing; Judaea in constant petty warfare, and almost 
exhausted by a severe and long-continued famine. But Helena, 
who appears a woman of great energy, did not hesitate 
to incur all these evils, so that she could but offer her sacrifice 
of thanksgiving in the chosen house of God. Izates readily 
acceded, making lavish preparations for her journey according 
to her rank, bestowing on her large sums of money ; and, in the 
true spirit of the religion they had both professed, which so 
inculcated filial respect and love, he himself accompanied her 
great part of her journey. 

The famine raging in Jerusalem would have terrified away 
any less zealous convert ; but Helena quietly took up her abodo 
in the distressed city, making it her business to relieve the 
sufferers by munificent gifts both of food and money. She 
despatched some of her household to Alexandria to purchase 
large' quantities of corn, and others to Cyprus, for a cargo of 
dried figs ; and, both missions accomplished with unusual 
promptness, and relief most judiciously bestowed, the memory 
of Queen Helena long lingered with the oppressed people ; and 
her acts are recorded by Josephus with a feeling and impressive- 
ness which are not often found in his details. Izates too, on 
being informed of the famine, sent large sums to the principal 
men in Jerusalem. Both himself and his mother appeared 
eager to demonstrate the truth and sincerity of their ?on version, 


* Josej'hus, Ant. b. xx. c. 2. 


PERIOD VI. HELENA. 


251 


oy their earnest endeavors for the good of the Jewish people ; a 
Striking contrast to the conduct of those Idumaean proselytes, 
whose only desire had been to Romanize the people, and 
amalgamate with the heathen both their religion and their land. 

How long Helena dwelt in Jerusalem does not appear ; b^t, 
from the good she accomplished, and the magnificent tombs, or 
pyramids, which she erected about three furlongs from Jerusa- 
lem, we are led to suppose that she had adopted the country as 
well as the religion for her own, and dwelt there the greater 
portion of the remainder of her life. Her strong affection for 
Izates demanded a powerful incentive to her living apart from 
him, and that incentive appears to have been, the delight of 
worshipping the Eternal in his temple ; the privileges of obeying 
every tittle of his law more faithfully and precisely than she 
could have done in her own land ; and the constant kindness and 
good works to the Hebrew people, with which she proved her 
piety and zeal. The death of Izates, after a prosperous reign 
of twenty-four years, caused the deepest affliction to his mother, 
for not only were they bound together by the adoption of the 
same creed, which drew the humau affections still closer than 
merely natural ties ; but Josephus alludes to him as a most 
dutiful and affectionate son. One consolation, however, she had ; 
the privileges and principles of Judaism were not all lost to her 
country, by the death of Izates. The crown of Adiabene went 
to Monobazus, her eldest son, who had also embraced Judaism ; 
and Helena, though aged and infirm, and bowed down by her 
sad bereavement, hastened to Adiabene, to congratulate and 
bless him on his accession. Izates had left the crown to his 
brother, instead of to either of his own sons, in gratitude for the 
fidelity and affection which, although put aside for the accession 
of a younger brother, Monobazus had always proved. Helena, 
however; did not long survive Izates ; she died at Adiabene. 
And Monobazus, in dutiful obedience to the last wishes of his 
mother and brother, had their remains transported to Jerusalem, 
where they were interred in the splendid mausoleum erected by 
Helena, no doubt with that intent. 

The history of Helena is a refreshing picture of feminine 
gentleness and family love, after the fearful deeds and characters 
we have of late perused. There is a gentle womanly disposi- 
tion, apparent even in her appeal to the people after her 
husband’s death, a horror of violence and severity, peculiarly 


252 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


consisting with her true feminine qualities : “ I believe you ara 
not unacquainted, that my husband was desirous that Izates 
should succeed him in the government, and thought him not 
unworthy so to do,” was her calm address, whose only eloquence 
was sincerity and truth. “ However, I wait your determination, 
for happy is he who receives a kingdom not from a single 
person only, but from the willing suffrages of a great many.” 

When the amour propre of a nation is thus conciliated, their 
decision is generally sure to be the decision desired. Unani- 
mously they pressed forward to pay homage to their queen, and 
confirm their late king’s resolution, advising at the same time 
the death of all the brethren and kinsmen of Izates, to secure 
him on the throne. But Helena’s gentle spirit shrank from so 
fearful a deed, though of Izates’ brethren only one was her own 
son. She calmed the popular excitement, by thanking them 
for their zeal, but desiring them to postpone such violent 
measures till Izates returned, and should himself think them 
expedient. The multitude consented, only exhorting her to 
restrain them in bonds for their own security, till the arrival of 
Izates, and to set up some one in whom she could place perfect 
trust, as regent of the kingdom in the meantime. Had Helena 
been an ambitious, or a politic and suspicious woman, it would 
have been very easy for her to have retained the regency 
herself; and had she not had perfect trust in the honor and 
affection of her eldest son, both for herself and Izates, she could 
not have confided the kingly power to his keeping, even placing 
the diadem upon his head, and the signet on his hand, endow- 
ing him with full powers as sovereign till Izates’ return. Few 
characters could have sustained this ordeal, and resigned a 
power, tne sweets of which had been fully tasted, to a younger 
brother; yet Monobazus did so: and in this very deed, and in 
the conlldence and affection existing uninterruptedly between 
the brothers thioJghout their lives, as in the beauty and 
unselfish honesty of their mutual characters, we read a still 
clearer commentary on the true character of their mother, than 
in her own acts, gentle and full of beauty as they were. 

None but a mother’s judicious training and impartial love 
could so have united her sons, that the elder could submit to 
the superiority of the younger without jealousy and resistance. 
Milman, indeed, attributes to the sedition of Monobazus, the 
attacks < J the Arabian and Parthian kings ; but as Josephus, whe 


PERIOD VI. HELENA 


253 


might have been living at the very time of these events, doe? 
not give us any warrant for the surmise, we reject it altogether. 
According to him, it was the desire of Monobazus, and other of 
the king’s kindred, to become Jews, which roused the Adiabe- 
nians to revolt, and to invite foreign potentates against their 
king. In fact, every war in which Izates was engaged, 
originated in the annoyance of his subjects at his embracing 
Judaism ; but he remained firm and unshaken in the religion, 
embraced not from ambition but conviction, and he triumphed 
over both foreign and domestic foes. 

The character of Helena would have ornameLted any reli- 
gion ; but we can discern throughout it the pure" spirituality at 
that period only discoverable in the religion of the Lo/d. 
Her disposition naturally clinging and gentle, her heart capable 
of the strongest emotions, her mind constantly urging to the 
good, could not rest satisfied with Heathen worship. She was 
instructed in the Jewish tenets ; their spirituality, their tempo- 
ral consolation, their eternal hope, and infinite love ; their vast 
capabilities for exercising the intellect and heart, filled up the 
void which Heathenism could not ; and Helena believed : and 
she bore witness, throughout the whole tenor of her after life, 
to the sincerity and purity of that belief. 

Now would this, could this conversion have taken place, if 
the Jewish religion degraded women to the rank of slaves and 
heathens? This single story would be sufficient to prove the 
groundless falsity of the charge. Helena was a powerful and 
respected queen and mother in her own nation, accustomed to 
receive homage, to be consulted, to make use of her intellect 
and political sagacity ; to take, in fact, a higher and more 
esteemed grade than was the general condition of Heathen 
women ; and is it likely she would sacrifice all these privileges 
of sex and station, by the adoption of a religion which deprived 
her of both ? What would have been the use of her conver- 
sion, if there were any ground for the false assertion that women 
have no souls, and neither the form nor the spirit of religion is 
incumbent upon them ? Had her conversion taken place when 
Israel was at the height of her temporal and spiritual glory — 
when a world acknowledged her holy supremacy, and sought 
her friendship as a land divinely favored — there might have 
been a doubt allowable as to whether Helena sought the safety 
and increase of her temporal dominions in the public profession 


254 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


i>f Judaism; but no such doubt can attach itself to the purity 
of her motives when we reflect on the then position of Judea, 
There could he neither glory nor satisfaction in uniting herself' 
with a nation sunk to the very lowest ebb of degradation, hover- 
ing, as it were, on the very brink of annihilation. But one 
motive could have actuated her; and that was the natural 
craving for a revealed religion, peculiar to dispositions such as 
hers. But Judaism would not have satisfied those cravings, if 
it really were the stern, harsh, exclusive superstition wnich it is 
by some proclaimed ; if its ordinances were for man, and woman 
were a mere cypher in its law’s. But such Judaism was 
unknown, till the slanders of modern times so reported it. 
Helena read in the Law of Moses the tender, pitying care of 
woman, in all her varied relations and positions of life, as we 
have endeavored to display it in our Second Period. She read 
that a Father had promised a place in His house, dearer even 
than sons and daughters, to all who kept His sabbaths and 
embraced His covenants, and therefore it was she believed ; and 
in her earnest zeal parted from her beloved children, left a home 
of peace and luxury, where she was known, respected, loved — 
to journey many toilsome and weary leagues, only for the hap- 
piness of sacrificing offerings of thanksgiving to the Lord of 
Hosts, who had in His mercy given her the knowledge of Him- 
self. Famine and misery were around her in Jerusalem ; she 
must have seen many painful evidences that the holy religion 
she had embraced was desecrated by its own offspring ; that social 
iniquities and individual apostasies were throwing a dark barrier 
between the Jew and his God ; yet she never wavered, devoting 
her fortune and her energies to deeds of kindness, charity, and 
love ; thus proving how completely she had become one with 
the people whose religion she professed. 

If woman were prohibited the privilege of sacrifice, etc., is it 
.ikely we should find Josephus recording the visit of a female 
proselyte to Jerusalem for that sole purpose ? or Helena herself 
bo anxious to obey the ordinances of the Law ? It is needless 
to continue the argument, the fact contains in itself the strong- 
est refutation of the charge levelled by the ignorant against us. 
The prejudices of education may endear even superstition or 
Heathenism to its votaries themselves ; but we may rest assured 
that no woman, respected and elevated by the customs and 
habits of her original creed and native subjects, would volunta 


PERIOD VI. BERENICE. 255 

rily adopt another tending to enslave and to debase her. He- 
f ena’s virtue and intellect had raised her above her nation and 
Her age, occasioning a void and loneliness which urged her to n 
seek and find repose in unusual studies. To define the void 
might have been even to herself impossible, until the word of 
God, explained by an earnest and pious Israelite, at once 
revealed and filled it ; and in its inexhaustible fullness satisfied 
her woman heart on earth, and pointed with an angel-finger to 
another world, where all the pan tings of intellect and affection 
would find sufficiency and rest ; and hope, yet dearer, where 
she and her beloved ones would meet again, and be with Israel’s 
God for ever ! To some women (Salome and Alexandra *br 
instance), these considerations would be of little value ; but to 
characters such as Helena of Adiabene, they would mark 
their immortal truth, in the glow of joy and blissful calm inse- 
parable from real religious faith, pervading for the first time an 
awakened human heart. 

The first year of the Jewish war, 66 of the Christian era, 
presents us with a striking illustration of the Hebrew female’s 
capability and freedom to make and to fulfil singular vows. 
The fact is briefly recorded, and trifling in itself, but important, 
as the only instance of the kind mentioned in our history. That 
there were many others, is more than likely. No law was insti- 
tuted by our great lawgiver which had not its practical illustra- 
tion in the history of his people. Nor would the law of vows 
of either kind, “ singular or Nazarite,” have formed part of the 
given code, if their necessity had not been visible in the wants 
and customs of the multitude. That w^e have only one recorded 
instance of its obedience by a woman of Israel, does not prove 
its previous disuse, but that those who had occasion to make 
and fulfil singular vows, were in too domestic and retired a 
position to obtain the notice of the historian. The manner in 
which Josephus alludes to it, marks it of frequent, not of singu- 
lar occurrence, a custom in fact of the nation, in case of “ dis- 
tempers or other distresses.”* 

The subject of this “ singular vow” is one that we may per- 
haps be blamed for introducing into our pages, her character, 
according to some of the Latin historians, being of doubtful 

* Josephus’s Wars, book ii. ch. 15. 


£56 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


reputation. As, however, this calumny cannot be proved — as, 
being a woman of Israel by birth and creed, she was an object 
of prejudice and aversion to the Romans ; and as the satirists 
then, as now, hesitated not to calumniate innocence and blacken 
reputation, only to provide themselves with a jest — we are not 
bound to credit the assertions of either class of writers. A 
glance over the appendix to the fifth book of Tacitus’s History 
will show the unfavorable light in which his nation was accus- 
tomed to regard the belief, customs, and ordinances of Judaism: 
and, therefore, it is more than likely that the very fact of Bere- 
nice being a Jewish woman unusually beautiful and gifted, 
admired by Vespasian, and actually beloved and nearly "wedded 
by Titus, should have excited the extreme jealousy of the 
Romans, from which calumny and suspicion, however base and 
unfounded, are sure to proceed. 

Josephus, whose history favors the Romans, and adopts their 
views as much as possible, of course insinuates the same scandal, 
which, however, lie never attempts to prove ; and the only 
instance in which he does bring Berenice forward, is not only in 
a womanly and amiable, but in a religious and patriotic light. 
Had this not been the case, we should have left her to the gene- 
ral historian ; but as that void in our records is rapidly advanc- 
ing, where there is scarcely any mention of individuals, male or 
female, and the history of the women of Israel is lost in the fear- 
ful vortex of national misery and subsequent dispersion, wo are 
glad to seize the faintest and most unfinished notice, which can 
in any point confirm our theory and illustrate our laws. 

One fact also, our readers must bear in mind ; the period in 
which the object of our present notice existed was on° of the 
grossest immorality. Custom authorized in many lations, 
actually legalized marriages, which, in the earlier stages of the 
world, and when the law of God was established and followed, 
had been regarded, as they would be now, most unlawful and 
impure. The religion of 'the Hebrews existed but in name. From 
the reign of Herod, the denationalization commenced. After 
his death, Roman procurators governed and Roman soldiers 
over-ran the land ; and such an awful spirit of party divided the 
Jews who yet remained, that the neutrals believed the dominion 
of the Romans far less evil than the divisions and seditions of 
their own. At such an epoch, all statutes, human and divine, 
were set aside ; a man did as his neighbor did, and custom 


PERIOD VI. — BERENICE. 


257 


tiune was law. The pure beautiful ordinances, prohibiting too 
Lear consanguinity in the marriage ties, were completely laid 
aside by the once holy nation for whom they were framed ; and 
the family of Herod appeared resolved on assisting their father’s 
plans for Romanizing the Jewish people, by emulating all the 
heathen nations in their utter indifference to the laws of mar- 
riage,* and framing unions regardless of the ties of relationship 
formerly restraining them. The union of brother and sister, 
horrible as it reads to us, was then in constant practice amongst 
the Egyptians, Syrians, Parthians, and occasionally amongst the 
more refined and polished Romans themselves. Nationally , 
this was an awful state of society, calling down always the 
visible wrath and chastisement of the Eternal, in the annihila- 
tion of their sinning nations. Individually, the crime was of far 
less magnitude ; for many sinned unconsciously, and the horror 
and loathing with which we look upon these things could not 
have been felt by those to whom custom was authority, — 
example, law. 

We do not write this to excuse Israel’s sinful departure from 
the law of Moses : we know the awful magnitude of their iniqui 
ties by the appalling nature of their chastisement. We simply 
mention the fact, to remove what would now appear the extreme 
sinfulness of Berenice, if the reports against her had foundation ; 
which foundation, search history as we may, we cannot find. 
Nay, in the extreme laxity of morals and multitude of impure 
connexions, we read the probable rise and only source of the 
rumors, Neither satirists nor prejudiced historians were likely 
to draw a line between unproved rumor and proved reality ; and 
it was enough for them that Berenice was a beautiful Jewess, to 
burden her with charges, frivolous and light to them, but 
throwing a stain upon her reputation, the blackness of which 
could scarcely be known till discovered by the reading of modern 
times. 

The records of the great-grand-daug'hter of Mariamne are sc 
brief and so little satisfactory, that all we can give is a simple 
fttatement of what is not very generally known concerning her ; 
her parentage and connexions ; making the link uniting her 
rith Jewish and Roman history more distinct than can be the 


* Josephus’s Antiq. book xviii. ch. 5 and note. 


258 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


case with mere general researches : and then revert to the eir 
eumstance which is the occasion of this notice. 

We have already alluded to the two sons of Mariamne^ 
Aristobulus and Alexander, and to their marriages ; the former 
with his cousin, Berenice, Salome’s daughter — the latter with 
Glaphyra of Cappadocia. Aristobulus left live children, two of 
whom were, Agrippa, afterwards king of Judea, and Herod, king 
of Chalcis. Agrippa, himself a grandson of Mariamne, married 
Cypros, a grand-daughter of the same princess by her daughtei 
Salampsio. By this Cypros, King Agrippa had five children, 
two sons — one of whom, Drusus, died young, the other known 
as the young Agrippa, was the last of the Idumseans who even 
jominally was king of the Jews, — and three daughters, Berenice, 
the object of our sketch, Mariamne, and Drusilla. Berenice was 
then great-grand-daughter to Mariamne by both her parents, 
and seems to have inherited all the grace and beauty of the Asmo- 
nsean family. In Jewish households there never w r as any 
distinction made between the education of sons and daughters ; 
both equally shared the care and instructions of their mother, 
who, were she a “ Woman of Israel,” was always, or ought to 
have been, perfectly competent to the task. We find in the 
Talmud repeated ordinances to this effect — even so far as to say, 
“ that if a man marries a woman without education, and only for 
her money, he will not have children according to his wishes,” 
thus giving an illustration of the laws which w T e insisted upon in 
our Second Period, as including mothers equally with fathers in 
the education of their children. 

The close connexion of brother and sister we have already 
seen in our notice of Aristobulus and Mariamne, and also, 
though in a very opposite light, of Herod and Salome, and some 
other instances. Sisters were never nonentities in the Jewish 
state ; they always shared, not the affection alone, but the rank 
and influence of their brothers, and were looked on by the 
multitude in a much superior light to the female scions of 
royalty in more modern times. Prom the extreme care of 
woman in the Jewish laws, the celebrated characters which, as 
women, had swelled their history, the custom for females to 
inherit when there were no males, the successior of a wife to the 
crown in preference to the sons, all elevated the position ol 
royal females to a perfect equality, socially considered, with 


PERIOD VI. BERENICE. 


255 


their husbands and brothers, and brought them more forward in 
the history of their people than is generally believed. 

We are anxious to mark this important fact, because it will 
throw light on the true position of Berenice, which, from being 
misunderstood by the mere chronicler of the age, is of course 
misrepresented, and so mystifies his readers equally with 
himself. 

There scarcely appears a year’s difference in the ages of Herod 
Agrippa’s elder children, the young Agrippaand Berenice,* and 
they were, therefore, thrown together as intimately and fondly 
as Aristobulus and Mariamne, probably accompanying their 
father and mother in all their wanderings, sharing their vicissi- 
tudes, and educated together in Rome. There were six years 
between Berenice and her next sister, Mariamne, and four 
between Mariamne and Drusilla ; consequently Berenice could 
have had no companion in her own family except her brother, 
with whom Agrippa the elder appears always to have associated 
her. We suppose this from a sentence in Josephus, f which we 
transcribe. Alluding to a slave, from whom Agrippa had 
received a trifling kindness, he says, “ When afterwards Agrippa 
w T as come to the kingdom, he took particular care of Thau- 
mastus, and got him his liberty from Caius, and made him his 
steward over his own estates ; and when he died he left him, to 
Agrippa, his son, and to Berenice , his daughter , to minister to 
them in the same capacity.” 

Now, unless Berenice had been, by her father’s will, associ- 
ated with her brother in the possession and government of these 
estates, there would have been no need to mention her name in 
conjunction with Agrippa’s in so simple a thing as the retaining 
a faithful servant in his post. In reading the unsatisfactory 
annals of the general historians, we must reason by analogy, 
or be for ever groping in the dark, searching for minute but 
important facts, and never successful in the search. It must 
have been a habit and a common judgment with the father, to 
associate his elder children, as mutually and equally concerned 
m his public and private affairs, or this charge would not have 
been so naturally left. We have the confirmation of this sug- 
gestion in later notices of Berenice ; but the historians of that 
period forget the sentence we have quoted, though that in itself 


* Josephus, Antiq., book xix. ch. 9. 


t Ibid, book xviii. eh. 6 


260 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


is sufficient to account for her influence with Agrippa in the 
government, and needs no supposition whatever of a nearer 
connexion between them. 

The first person to whom Berenice appears to have been 
betrothed was Marcus, according to Josephus, a son of Alexan- 
der Lysimachus, an alabarch who had been imprisoned by 
Caligula, and set at liberty and restored to all his former honors 
by Claudius, whose intimate friend he was. As Berenice was, 
however, only fifteen, if so much, when her father gave her in 
marriage to her uncle, Herod of Chalcis, this could not have 
been more than a betrothal entered into while they were chil- 
dren, as was frequently the custom, but which Marcus did not 
live to complete. The intended union, however, is sufficient 
proof how little nationality existed in the heart of Agrippa at 
that period. His varied life had naturally occasioned this, 
though he appears to have governed his kingdom during his 
brief reign with all the feelings of a Hebrew, and to have incul- 
cated the same in the hearts of his children. 

Berenice was the second wife of Herod, whom Agrippa’s 
influence with Claudius had, before he gave him his daughter, 
made king of Chalcis. His first had been Mariamne, grand- 
daughter of Herod the Great and his Samaritan wife, Malthaea. 
Berenice appears to have enjoyed six years of a happy, though 
uneventful, wedded life with Herod, becoming the mother of 
two sons, Berenicianus and Hyrcanus. Her residence seems, 
however, to have been more in the dominions of her father in 
Judea, than at Chalcis. Josephus repeatedly alludes to Herod 
of Chalcis, as if he were a constant attendant of Agrippa’s 
court, which accounts for Berenice’s interest in the people of 
Judea, and being, in fact, more intimately known to them than her 
brother Agrippa, who, fir the last three years, had been finish- 
ing his education under Claudius Caesar. Herod Agrippa died in 
45 ; Berenice was then sixteen ; and Herod of Chalcis, dying in 
50, left her a young and beautiful widow of twenty-one. For 
fifteen or seventeen years she remained a widow, residing alter- 
nately at Rome and in Jerusalem. Her father’s long residence 
in the former place, and intimate connexion and friendship with 
the highest Romans, of course made Rome her second country, 
and caused her to be as well known there as in Jerusalem. In 
00 we find her in Jerusalem, in pursuance of her singular vow ; 
md exposed to great danger from the infuriated Roman soldierv 


PERIOD VI.-BERENICH 


261 


(to both of which circumstances we will refer at the conclusion 
of our sketch). Between 66 and 69 she must have become 
queen of Pontus, by her marriage with Polemo, king of that 
country, an engagement entered into to silence the tongue of 
falsehood, which had dared charge her with an improper con- 
nexion with her brother. Before, however, she consented to the 
union, Polemo embraced Judaism, and was received into the 
covenant, a proof that even in that dark period of national 
apostasy some regard to religious decency was observed. In 
69 we find her, as queen of Pontus, embracing the cause of 
Vespasian against his rival, Vitellius,* whom the Roman legions 
were endeavoring to elect emperor in Vespasian’s stead, joining 
the confederacy in the latter’s favor, and levying troops for his 
assistance. 

Her marriage with Polemo, however, was not of long con- 
tinuance. Entered into without love on either side, by her to 
prove the utter falsity of a scandalous rumor, by him to obtain 
possession of her riches, it was soon dissolved by mutual consent. 
Polemo repudiated his Judaism, only embraced for Berenice’s 
gold ; and Berenice returned to her life of freedom. Then it 
was she must have attracted the love of Titus; for it was in 
7of that he would have married her, had he not feared the 
violent opposition of the Roman people, then more than usually 
incensed against the Jews, from the vast numbers of Romans 
who had perished in the Jewish war, and the daring and noble 
opposition to the imperial arms, which the miserable people had 
so very lately made. 

Instead of marrying her (a dazzling destiny, which, to one 
educated in the Roman school, as had been Berenice, would 
have been difficult, if not impossible, to refuse, simply from 
national motives), Titus separated from her, and Berenice’s life 
closed in retirement. Her name is not again mentioned in his- 
tory, not even her subsequent residence, nor what was her final 
lot : this last female representative of the Idumsean and Asmo- 
n?ean lines is lost to her posterity. We know that Agrippa 
lived and died the contented vassal of Rome ; but of his sister, 
60 nearly raised to become even empress of the world, this 
scanty detail is refused us ; and we look in vain for her slightest 


* Tacitus, Hist., b:ok v., sect. 81. 
t 73 according Tacitus — 79 according to Goldsmith. 


262 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


mention. This is disappointing ; for, in the desolate conditioc 
of the Jews, their miseries, martyrdoms, massacres, and disper- 
sions, we cannot form even an idea of her future destiny. Mil* 
man says, that “ She returned some years afterwards to Rome, 
but never regained her former favor.” In that case her resi- 
dence was probably again with the beloved brother of her 
youth ; and on this idea we can rest more satisfied than did we 
think of her homeless and wandering like the remainder of her 
wretched nation. 

The sketch we have given is all that history, either Jewish or 
Roman, records in any connected point of view. Of her 
character we can learn little; but she appears to have been 
endowed with those superior qualities which gave her position 
and influence both with Jews and Romans. The occasion of 
her making the vow which she went to Jerusalem to perforin, 
history does not mention. But that she did perform it, offer- 
ing sacrifices for thirty days, is sufficient for us ; by its strong 
confirmation of our assertion, that the Jewish religion elevated 
woman in all her religious duties and responsibilities to a per- 
fect equality with man. Berenice, too, lived at the very time 
in which our opponents declare the religion of God had been so 
changed and abused by mistaken zealots, as imperatively 
to need reform and extermination, which Jesus was sent to 
accomplish. Whatever these zealots might have done, they 
certainly could not have deprived woman of her spiritual privi- 
leges, and denied her the power of either performing her vow 
or offering sacrifices, or Berenice would not have come to 
Jerusalem, then in a most awful state of misery and constant 
murders, expressly for the observance of the forms necessary to 
its fulfilment : nay, she could not have made the vow at all, 
if she had not had perfect liberty, spiritual and temporal, so 
to do. 

This fact, then, is very important in our history, as women of 
Israel, and has nothing whatever to do with the private charac- 
ter of Berenice (which, however, we will endeavor to clear 
from the misrepresentations of historians). The fact, that 
the vow was taken by a widow in Israel, and observed in 
Jerusalem with all the attendant ceremonies enjoined by the 
priests, is enough in itself to prove that such vows were custom- 
ary, and woman, as well as man, had the power to make and to 
fulfil them. 


PERIOD VI. BERENICE. 


263 


Nor in the thirty days’ sacrifice, and going barefoot, which 
appears to have beeu the case with Berenice, can we discover 
what Whiston, in his note to this chapter of Josephus, supposes 
-—the extreme rigor of Pharisaic ordinances. The permission 
to make vows, and the care lest females should be carried away 
by ill-regulated enthusiasm, is all that was ordained in the law 
of Moses — the manner of performing that vow, and the service 
or penance which its performance included, was left to the will 
of the subject, or, at his or her discretion, to the guidance of the 
priest. It was for this very reason, that the making and man- 
ner of fulfilling vows were to be entirely voluntary, that woman 
was compelled to have the sanction of father or husband. 
Such a vow, for instance, as Berenice’s, would have been 
incompatible with the duty of a wife or daughter, and there- 
fore probably not have received the necessary sanction of man, 
though the enthusiasm of the woman might have urged her to 
make it. Had the manner of performing vows been laid down 
by our great lawgiver, there would have been no need for him 
to have burdened woman’s observance of them with a proviso, 
for the service or penance would have been ordained according 
to her power of obedience : but this would have interfered too 
closely with domestic and social freedom ; and she was, there- 
fore, permitted to make vows of service or penance, according to 
her own inclination, subservient only to the superior 'wisdom and 
calmer reasoning of her husband or father. 

Berenice, at the time of her yow, was six-and-thirty years of 
age, a widow, and perfectly independent, both of will and action. 
She had neither father nor husband to interfere with her 
intentions — was of sufficient age to know well what she was 
about — of sufficient mental qualifications, and having been edu- 
cated in Rome, without any of the exclusiveness of her own 
people, of sufficient freedom of thought in religious matters, not 
blindly to follow the instructions of priests, if they interfered 
with her own ideas ; and, therefore, it is more than probable 
that the sacrifices and going barefoot were no orders of the 
priest, but Berenice’s own voluntary adoption, the manner in 
which she chose to perform her “ singular vow,” and with which 
♦he priests interfered not, save in their sacred functions, to aid 
,er in its performance. The riches of Berenice are more than 
once alluded to ; and, therefore, the thirty days’ sacrifice, 
although expensive, was quite within her power; and the going 
23 


264 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


barefoot, though revolting to our ideas of the religion of Moses, 
which ordained loving obedience , not personal penance , was then 
probably considered a mark of humility, and as revealing 
to the nation, that rank and station were not to interfere with 
the personal devotion to the Eternal, comprised in the making 
and observance of singular vows. 

So much for Berenice’s vow, as regards us nationally. As it 
regards her individually, it proves that, even while giving them 
what, in those times, was considered the advantages of a Roman 
education, Herod Agrippa must have taught them the religion 
of the Hebrews — made it a point with them — else we should 
never hear of Berenice deeming this singular vow was needed, 
or that it was absolutely necessary for Polemo, king of Pontus, 
to become a Jew before she married him. Nor, had she been 
educated in Roman principles only, would she have felt and 
acted as she did for her helpless people, during her residence in 
Jerusalem. Florus was then procurator of Judea, and govern- 
ing with a mercilessness and ferocity, that at length caused 
the already full cup of Jewish forbearance and Jewish misery to 
run over. Imprisonments, scourgings, crucifixions, and mas- 
sacres by wholesale, ceased not during the whole period of 
his authority. In one day 3,600 men, women, and children, 
fell unresisting victims : and neither rank, nor worth, nor even 
Roman citizenship — for some of the distinguished Jews had 
obtained equestrian rank — were spared ; the highest suffering 
with the meanest, the worthy with the base. 

Repeatedly had Berenice sent messengers — the most dis- 
tinguished of her household — to intercede with Florus for 
her miserable countrymen ; but, high as was her rank, influen- 
tial as she was with his Roman masters, the monster heeded 
her not. Not even when, in her penitential attire, she herself 
Btood before his tribunal, and sought by her own pleadings 
to check the torrent of his cruelty. Her hapless countrymen 
were hewn down before her very eyes ; old age and helpless 
infancy, — the delicate female, — all perished ; and she herself 
was in such imminent danger from the infuriate soldiery, 
%s to be compelled to fly to the palace and collect her 
guards around, to shield herself from insult, as well as death. 
Yet she made no effort to quit Jerusalem, which she could have 
done with the greatest ease. Rather than fail in the perform- 
ance of her vow, she shared the dangers of her countrymen 


PERIOD VI. BERENICE. 


265 


living in daily dread of her own death, and in daily sight 
of misery and murder. Nor was she merely a passive witness 
she wrote the most touching accounts of the cruelty and rapa- 
city of Florus, to his superior officer, Cestius Gallus, entreating 
his interference in behalf of her oppressed people ; and when 
Agrippa returned, joined with him in every eflbrt to reconcile 
the Jews and Romans, and so obtain for the former security and 
peace. She sat besidq her brother during his memorable 
address., by her tears and silent eloquence betraying that 
her heart also was in his words ; and even when, indignant 
at their ungrateful conduct to himself, Agrippa left the misera- 
ble city to itself, and returned to his own kingdom of Chalcis,* 
Berenice still seems to have lingered. Nor did she leave 
the country until her vow was fully performed, and Jerusalem in 
too fearful a state to admit of any hope of achieving or adminis- 
tering good. 

Surely these are characteristics of an energetic, yet gentle, 
feeling woman. We can trace nothing, in this lowly adherence 
to a penitential vow and devotion to the interests of a miserable 
people, resembling the gay life and pleasure-loving propensities 
of a professed and alluring beauty. Josephus, indeed, accuses 
her of the unamiable qualities of annoying and ill-treating 
her youngest sister, Drusilla, on account of her extraordinary 
beauty : but that this charge must have been made without 
either foundation or reflection on the part of the historian, 
is very clear from his own recital. The beauty and influence of 
Berenice had been long known and widely acknowledged. She 
had neither occasion, nor probably inclination, to envy her sister 
the gifts she herself possessed. But the very manner in which 
Josephus writes the charge, shows its fallacy. Drusilla was 
already married to Aziz, king of Amesa, who had consented to 
embrace the Jewish religion to obtain her. When Felix 
was procurator of Judea, he saw Drusilla, and fell madly 
in love with her. Through the means of a Cypriot Jew, 
he persuaded her to forsake her husband Aziz, and marry him. 
“ Accordingly, she acted ill ; and because she was desirous 
to avoid her sister Berenice’s envy — for she was very ill-treated 
Ivy her on account of her beauty — was prevailed upon to 

* After the death of his brother-in-law, and also uncle, ITerod o’ 
Chalcis, the kingdom of Chalcis was given to Agrippa. 


266 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


transgress the laws of her country, and marry Felix.” Now it 
appears to me that Berenice’s envj 7 (even granted she had 
to encounter it) had nothing whatever to do with this decision 
The representations of the Cypriot, the seductive persuasions of 
Felix, and her own inclinations, were the sole incentives; 
for she certainly was not a whit more protected from her sister’s 
envy as the wife of Felix, than she had been as the wife of 
A^z: nay, scarcely as much; for, when united to Felix, 
she was continually liable to be thrown in Berenice’s way, both 
in Jerusalem and Rome; and this could not have been the case 
when residing in her first husband’s kingdom of Emesa. This 
charge, then, against Berenice has no foundation in reason ; but 
most probably originated in Josephus’s great wish to conciliate 
the Romans, even while he appeared to be writing an impartial 
history of his own country. Had he been straightforward, 
we should have found some condemnation of Drusilla for marry- 
ing a heathen, and forsaking, without any just cause, her former 
husband. But as the heathen was a Roman, he passes over the 
transgression very lightly ; and, instead of blaming Drusilla for 
conduct which was undoubtedly evil, absolves her at the 
expense of her sister, who had probably no more to do with 
it than he had himself. And this is the justice of historians ! 
Surely we should examine well, ere we permit the youthful 
mind to embrace their views as infallible ; and rather encourage 
them to reflect, and have an opinion of their own, instead 
of blindly swallowing the food which historians provide. 

That Berenice should sometimes be regarded as the sister, and 
sometimes as the wife of Agrippa, does not at all surprise us, for 
some historians actually call her his wife.* What foundation 
they have for this assertion, however, we should be glad to 
know. Certainly, Josephus must be to them an unknown 
authority ; for he shows her parentage and connexions some- 
what too clearly for this idea to originate with him. The mis- 
take of the moderns, and the false scandalous reports of the 
ancients, may however arise from the same causes. We have 
already shown the close tie uniting Jewish brothers and sisters 
of nearly the same age; that Agrippa and Berenice wens 
always associated in the thoughts, and even the will of 
their father. As Herod’s wife, and queen of Chalck., Berenice 


* Jahn’s Hebrew Commonwealth. 


PERIOD VI. — BERENICE. 


267 


was more continually in Jerusalem, and learning lessons of 
government rather from her father than her brother, who 
was then at Rome. Herod, though king of Chalcis, almost con- 
stantly resided in Jerusalem ; and during the minority of 
the young Agrippa, obtained the sovereignty over the Temple, 
and the privilege of nominating the high priest. Berenice was, 
therefore, actually queen over the Jews, at that time, as well as 
of Chalcis ; and the former people were accustomed to regard 
and feel towards her, as with her husband, the representative of 
royalty. 

When Herod died, his kingdom of Chalcis, over which 
Berenice was still queen, was given to Agrippa, and the brother 
and sister were, in consequence, again thrown so closely together, 
that as Agrippa had no wife, they were always alluded to, and 
spoken of as king and queen. As the daughter, sister, and 
widow of kings, accustomed, too, to share in the government, 
and influence the people, she was always spoken of as Queen 
Berenice, and queen of Chalcis, over which country Agrippa 
was also king. And mere casual readers are therefore likely to 
consider her as the wife of the king, not knowing how, as his 
sister, she could have had any right to the title. Acting in 
concert with Agrippa, as their early education had accustomed 
them to do, we see her, as in the affair of Florus and Agrippa’s 
address to the people, occupying that position which, not gene- 
rally devolving on the sisters of royalty, confirms the supposition 
of a nearer connexion. But the supposition falls to the ground 
before the simple facts we have brought forward. Berenice 
was, in fact, a more independent sovereign of Judea, or rather 
of a remnant of the Jewish people, than her brother ; for him 
the Romans feared, lest by placing regal power in his hands, 
their own power over Judea would be diminished. Berenice as 
a woman, and the wife of a king of Chalcis, was to them a mere 
cypher with regard to the state, however admired as a beautiful 
woman in Rome; but the interest she really did take in the 
affairs of the people, we perceive by her conduct during the 
administration of Florus. 

We have read and reflected on the subject deeply; but 
though we see much which might be perverted into the rumor 
to which we have alluded, a consideration of facts proves its 
ntter want of solid foundation. Our authorities are, however, 
open to all readers, and they are at liberty to adopt their own 


269 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


opinions. We would only entreat them to reflect on the facti 
here brought forward under their view, as likely to assist them 
in their decision — to accustom themselves to reason from analogy, 
as well as to exercise understanding, which is too often thought 
sufficient in itself for the comprehension of history. We are 
too far removed from the time in which Berenice lived, to pro- 
nounce judgment decidedly for or against her; but when not a 
single instance is brought forward to make manifest impropriety 
of conduct, and all that is clearly related of her proves a reli- 
gious, national, and feeling character — when her defamers are 
Roman satirists, and Roman historians, for whose dislike it was 
enough that she was a Jewess — when the pages of her own 
historian are but too often tarnished with crooked views, partial 
representation, and Roman feelings, why should we not be 
permitted to judge charitably as well as harshly ? to doubt as well 
as believe ? Her character is, indeed, not written with sufficient 
clearness for us to draw thence a lesson ; but our history of the 
women of Israel would scarcely have been complete had we 
omitted her, more especially as her history practically illustrates 
a law of our state, and demonstrates convincingly that even in 
that period of spiritual and moral darkness, not a statute existed 
which could contradict the written law of Moses, by a refusal to 
women of those spiritual privileges, and that solemn responsibilitv, 
therein so forcibly inculcated. 


CHAPTER XI. 

BENERAL HISTORY, AND CONCLUSIONS THENCE 
ELICITED. 

In the fearful epochs of misery and war which followed, we 
find no further mention of woman individually ; but, as an 
important evidence of the care which the Jewish religion took 
of females, we find Josephus, in his character of general (which 
he fulfilled infinitely better than that of historian), laboring with 


PERIOD VI. GENERAL REMARKS. 269 

seal and earnestness to protect the females from insult or out 
rage. In lawless nations, in times of such terrible evil, thk 
would not have been thought of ; whereas with the Hebrew 
patriot, surrounded as he was with many heavy cares and 
imminent dangers, it was the first consideration, and was never 
lost sight of throughout the whole of his career. 

In glancing back over the period, which has detained us much 
longer than we anticipated, from the return from Babylon to 
the war, we cannot find a single evidence of the veracity or 
foundation of the charge of Jewish female degradation, nor in fact 
the workings of a single statute contradictory to the beautiful spirit 
of the law of Moses. All we have read, every female character 
brought forward, marks the superior social elevation and indi- 
vidual intellect of the Hebrew females, to the women of any of 
the surrounding nations. Nay, we see them occupying positions 
as wives and sisters — of kings, higher and far more influential 
than they ever did, or do, in any Gentile land. Instead of 
being sunk into mere nonentities, as, were they refused all spirit- 
ual privileges and temporal freedom, they must have been, we 
behold their influence, either for good or bad, as great and far- 
spreading as female influence ever was in any other either ancient 
or modern land. We cannot discern a trace of that social or 
domestic abasement which, had any either divine or human 
statute existed, must have been visible at a time when human 
nature was sunk to the lowest ebb. It is no longer Bible-times 
or inspired characters which we are considering. The nation 
was a holy nation no longer, having departed through her 
iniquities from the Lord. He had left her children to their own 
hearts ; but, in the midst of evil, still the law and its beautiful 
ordinances lived and breathed in many noble hearts, and its 
atmosphere was still inhaled by the people though its reviving 
sunlight had departed. Not in such a period could woman 
have taken her natural position, if any law had once existed to 
her abasement ; but she simply retained that which she had 
always possessed , and this at the advent of Christianity. 

Nor can we discern the faintest evidence of polygamy at this 
period. If we glance back to the return from Babylon, w r e 
must remark that every king and priest and prince- is recorded 
as possessing but one wife. Simon, John Hyrcanus, Aris- 
tobulus I., Alexander Jannaeus — both his sons, Aristobulus and 
Hyrcanus — Alexander, the father of Mariamne, her own twc 


270 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


sons, arid the other descendants of Herod, the wives of all of 
whom are mentioned, confirm both the legality and the custom 
of but one wife, at the very era when our opponents declare the 
religion of Jesus was absolutely needed to reform the abuses in 
the marriage state. “Herod had ten wives,” there will 
many to exclaim, and bring history forward as their authors 
With all due deference to them, we assert, aye, and will prove, 
that Herod had but three legal wives , and that just in the same 
way as adversaries of Christianity might , if they chose, declare 
that Charles II. had ten or twenty wives, and so believe Chris- 
tianity permitted polygamy ; so with an equal share of justice 
may the opponents of Judaism bring forward Herod as an 
evidence of the degradation of the Jewish religion and its 
sanction of polygamy. The personal character of Herod, as 
well as his magnificence, indeed much more strongly resembled 
the character of Henry VIII. : the similarity, in fact, between 
them on many points being so curious, that it might make an 
interesting historical parallel, though, in the violence of passion 
and power of remorse, Herod had the advantage ; but we men- 
tion Charles II., simply to state, that he might just as well be 
looked upon as the representative of Christianity as Herod of 
Judaism. 

But now to prove that only three of his wives can be consi- 
dered as legally wedded. Before he married Mariamne, or 
even made overtures for her hand, Herod divorced his first wife 
Doris , though she had already given him a son, and he had 
nothing to allege against her, but his own desire to forward his 
ambition, by a union with the Asmonaean line. How if poly- 
gamy were the law and the custom of the land, why need he 
have taken the trouble of divorcing Doris ? Mariamne would 
equally have been his legal wife, her children equally his heirs ; 
and though Doris might be the less beloved, the law provided 
for her, even under such an emergency. But, notwithstanding 
all this, he divorced her before he married Mariamne ; and 
surely this alone would prove, that man had already, in some 
degree, made the advance contemplated, when the law interfered 
not with his private habits, and custom had already rendered 
the remission needless, although the laws for the offspring of 
divorced wives still rendered their births legal, and gave them 
their share of the inheritance. It is, in fact, from this that 
Herod in his own person appears to have practised polygamy ; 


PERIOD VI. GENERAL REMARKS. 27l 

but that only one wife had become the custom of the country is 
further proved by the historian, who mentions but one other 
public union. Two years after the execution of the Asmonaean 
princess, during which time he was too much tormented by 
mental remorse and physical disease, to think of taking another 
wife, Herod married another Mariamne, the daughter of Simon, 
an obscure individual, but of princely descent, and she enjoyed 
that dignity, such as it was, for twenty years, till, supposing her 
to be an accomplice in the conspiracy of Antipater against him- 
self, he divorced her in the hist year of his life and reign. 
Now of this second Mariamne, Josephus makes particular men- 
tion in his Antiquities (book xv. ch. 9, sect. 3), that to enable 
him to make her his wife, he elevated the rank of her father, 
thinking if he did not legally wed her, he would be stigmatized 
with cruelty and tyranny, qualities the semblance of which he 
wished to avoid. 

There is no mention of his thus wedding any of his other (so 
called) wives ; and, therefore, that he had them, and that their 
children were all considered legitimate, is not any proof of poly- 
gamy being then a national custom : for even granting Herod 
had publicly married the whole nine, it would not have weighed 
a single grain against the fact, that every other king, priest, or 
prince, mentioned since the return from Babylon, had but one. 
He was one who, in every single act, set law, especially the 
Jewish law, at defiance. According to Gibbon, the wise and 
good emperor Charlemagne had also nine wives, but we do not 
therefore accuse Christians of favoring that doctrine ; then why 
should we lay Herod’s licentiousness, granting he proved it, 
which history denies rather than confirms, to tin score of the 
holy religion which, though he professed , he certainly never 
practised ? 

In a careful and critical survey of the manners and customs 
of the Jews, between the return from Babylon and their final 
dispersion, we find nothing whatever differing from the precepts 
of the early Christians. The apostles were themselves Jews, 
who wrote for the Gentiles, and condensed and simplified for 
them, the sublime morality of the Mosaic code. They do not 
oreach a single precept, they do not proclaim a single truth 
they do not give a single rule for social and domestic guidance, 
which we Hebrews had not known and practised ages before 
they wrote — and wrote, in fact, from their own experience of 


✓ 


2*72 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

Jewish manners and customs. The reverend collector of the 
“ Old Paths” could have known very little of Jewish history, or 
wilfully misinterpreted that which he did know, to make the 
extraordinary assertion that the introduction of monogamy 
belongs to Christianity alone. With very few exceptions, the 
actors of the New Testament are all Jews; and the domestic 
life there recorded of course reflects the Jewish life of those 
days : and had polygamy then existed, would it not have been 
one of the most important points for the Apostles of the new 
creed to exalt the new moral law above the old ? But we do 
not find this ; — exactly in accordance (in this instance) with the 
Old Testament, the New Testament nowhere ordains monogamy 
and prohibits polygamy. Impartial men allow this, and Dr. 
Channing, who, though no Protestant, must surely be consi- 
dered a Christian, writes concerning Milton’s opinion of poly- 
gamy, “ Finding no prohibition of polygamy in the New 
Testament, he believed that not only holy men would be 
traduced, but Scripture dishonored by pronouncing it morally 
evil and again, “ We believe it to be an undisputed fact, that 
although Christianity was first preached in Asia, which had 
been from the earliest ages the seat of polygamy, the Apostles 
never denounced it as a crime, and never required their consorts 
to put away all wives but one.”* Surely this is an important 
confirmation of our assertion, that we did not require the preach- 
ing of the Apostles to teach us that refinement and elevation of 
the social system which, with the advancement of humanity, 
time would procure us, and which was in fact obtained at the 
very era in which we are told it was first offered us, by the 
adoption of a superior moral code. 

The text to which Christians appeal as the prohibition of 
polygamy, is one from which a very different conclusion might 
be drawn — “ Whoso shall put away his wife (except for adul- 
tery) and shall marry another, committeth adultery, and whoso 
marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.” Surely 
this can only mean, that a man is forbidden unlawfully to put away 
one wife, and marry another in her stead, not to keep the first, 
and add another to his household ; and the spirit of this precept 
we have already had in the Mosaic law ; but, even granting that 
it does prohibit polygamy, we, too, have a prohibition of equal, 

* Channing’s W /rks (People’s Edition), vo\ i. page 2S 


PERIOD VI. GENERAL REMARKS. 273 

il not superior force, and written much about the same time by 
the venerable Rabbi Arni : “ I say, that any man who marries a 
second wife, must fully have repudiated his first a precept 
on which Herod appears to have originally acted, by his divorc- 
ing Doris before he married Mariamne. That he took Doris 
back again after the first Mariamne’s death, proves nothing. 
The Jewish law forbade such an act ; but we have seen that he 
cared nothing for the laws ; but that Mariamne was his sole wife 
while she lived is sufficient for our purpose. 

There may, perhaps, be some who think these remarks irrele- 
vant to our subject ; but if they aid, as they must do, our asser- 
tion, that the Jewish religion is enough for her female votaries, 
that we need no other to elevate and secure our natural position, 
we earnestly trust that they will not be dismissed unread. We 
mean no disrespect to other creeds : we shrink from following 
the example of some, who endeavor to exalt their own faith by 
debasing and throwing contempt upon another. We would only 
prove, that the imperfection (if the non-prohibiting polygamy be 
such) of our moral code exists equally in the other ; and that it 
is the gradual but sure advancement of the human species, 
which is the refiner and elevator of domestic and social life — 
not solely the ordinances of any particular laws. The first idea 
of polygamy being allowed, supposes a degraded position for 
women ; but we have seen, that even at the period of its prac- 
tice in Judaism, women were not degraded, for the law provided 
against its abuse : and even then, with very few exceptions, the 
chosen servants of the Eternal proved, in their own persons, the 
advance beyond their age in the practice of monogamy. 

The captivity in Babylon had been an era in Jewish history. 
The partial return to Jerusalem, and dispersion over other lands, 
had occasioned very many changes. Man, even in the midst of 
apparently increasing evil and darkening morality, had yet, in 
actual fact, made a stride in advance, and much which had pol 
luted the nation before, in the worshipping and sacrificing to 
idols, the fearful abuse of the gracious non-interference with 
Eastern customs and long endeared habits, and other crimes 
coeval with man’s least refined state of existence — all had given 

* Yebamoth, fol. 65, col. a. For this and many of the preceding 
-emarks on polygamy and the Christian and Jewish discussions on the 
point, I am indebted to the kind suggestions and valuable information of 
Mr. Theodores, of Manchester. 


2*4 THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

way and been trampled on in the terrible revolution which, 
through the Babylonish power, had overwhelmed the land. 
Sins of equal magnitude, and demanding yet more fearful retri- 
bution, from the neglect and heedlessness of former chastisement, 
indeed, desecrated J udea ; but, in the very different nature of 
the evil, the very sins themselves, we see, as it were, the advance- 
ment in human powers. The good in human nature will not 
make advance alone. Good and evil passions mutually sway the 
heart of man ; and, according as the one or other gains the 
ascendency, so will be the increased good or increased evil in 
appearance of the world. But having an equally increased 
power of good, the evil is only visibly evil ; the under-current is 
still working, though invisibly, far more powerfully and benefi- 
cially, than in those periods when the capabilities of good and 
of evil were less than they are now. The conflicting powers 
could not produce the same end ; but as the Divinity in the 
good advances, the evil will, in the end, be both visibly and 
invisibly subdued ; and man, through the grace of God, attain 
that perfection for which he was originally framed. 

We see the prophecy of this in the sublime fact, that there is 
never evil without its being the parent of good. No national 
revolution ever yet took place without being followed by a 
rapid stride in human nature, and as strikingly visible as far- 
spreading good : yet during the continuance of those revolutions, 
what can we trace or feel, but the supremacy of evil, in the war, 
famine, misery in a thousand shapes, which devastate mankind ? 
Still good is working, and we know and see it when the darken- 
ed torrent has rolled back, and the clear crystal waters, reflecting 
the blue azure of the eternal heavens, are seen beneath. 

Thus good sprang for Israel from the captivity of Babylon, 
working even in the midst of the crime and sin in which its 
visible form was but too soon swallowed up. The minds of 
men had advanced ; but left to their own hardened hearts to 
obey or disobey the laws of their God, and so prove themselves 
worthy of the mercies proffered if they obeyed, they chose the 
evil, and so by their increased capabilities for its accomplishment, 
hurled down the most awful chastisement on their own heads, 
and on their holy land, sweeping in one fearful vortex the inno- 
cent and the guilty, the pious and the blasphemer, the obedient 
and the disobedient : for in this world no distinction might be 
made. The King of heaven waited till they appeared before 


PERIOD VI. — GENERAL REMARKS. 


2*75 


II is throne to pronounce sentence according to their hearts yet 
more than according to their deeds. 

But humanity itself had not gone back, though all on earth 
seemed dark and terrible. Good worked even there. The 
Divine part of our mingled nature was visible in those instances 
of patriotism, martyrdom, earnestness, and spirituality, which 
our history records of men and women, old age and youth, even 
in the blackest tempest of the war, and surrounded as they 
were with men, who, given up to their own passions and incli- 
nations, so succumbed to the evil as to appear incarnate fiends. 
And good sprang from this ; aye, not only from the evil of th6 
war, but from the untold-of, incalculable, indescribable wretch- 
edness of dispersion and persecution. It brought, nay, it is still 
bringing Israel once more, in loving faith and unquestioning 
obedience, to his God, and hastening on that day, when the 
evil shall be entirely subdued, and the good reign triumphant. 

With these reflections we will conclude the Sixth Period of 
our history, leaving to the Seventh a glance over our dispersion, 
and its effect on the present condition of our nation, male and 
female. Brought down, as the history of the women of Israel 
now is, to nearly seventy years after the advance of Christi- 
anity, the proofs of our non-abasement and degradation become 
yet more important ; for there are many to assert, that in the 
Bible-times the Hebrew females shared the holy privileges of 
the males, but that it was the falling-off from this spiritual 
Judaism, the mingling human with Divine authority, which so 
degraded and blinded the Hebrews after the Babylonish cap- 
tivity, as absolutely to demand for our salvation the belief in the 
atonement of Jesus, and adoption of the new creed v’hich his 
apostles preached. 

We trust that we have convincingly proved to our own 
iiation, and from our own history, that this was not the case — 
that no human additions to the pure law had, between the first 
and second captivity, lowered the position, or interfered with the 
spiritual privileges of the Women of Israel. The conversion 
and earnest zeal of Helena of Adiabene would be in itself 
sufficient to controvert this charge ; and we have, in addi- 
tion, alike the story of the martyr-mother — the independent 
sovereignty of Alexandra, wife of Alexander Jannaeus — the 
influence of Mariamne, as sole representative of the Asmonaeans 
■—and of Salome, in the pursuit of her fiend-like machinations 


276 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEI. 


— of Berenice, in the performance of her singular vow, and he! 
rank and power as the sister and widow of kings, to convince us 
still more unanswerably, that the woman of Israel enjoyed a 
temporal power, and privileges peculiarly her own ; and was 
debarred in not a single instance, of the spiritual privileges and 
solemn responsibilities which had been bestowed on her by the 
law of God, and which the manners and customs of her country 
at the advent of Christianity undeniably confirmed. This, then, 
is enough for us. There is no trace before the dispersion of 
that mingling of human with Divine ordinances with which we 
are charged ; and therefore we cannot allow, that for us the 
moral preaching of the Christian apostles was needed. If such, 
indeed, took place after the dispersion, it was from the care of 
holy men to keep pure and holy the jewel of their faith, which 
ivas threatened to be buried, alas ! beneath the bloody ashes of 
constant persecution ; and how might we accept as saving, puri- 
fying, and reforming, the creed of those very men, whose cruel 
oppression occasioned the very evil from which they bid us 
turn. No ! even in the midst of anarchy, misery, and blood, 
the religion of God shone forth Divine. It was sufficient for us 
then ; and oh ! doubly dearer, holier, more precious is it to us 
• ow ! 


SEVENTH PERIOD. 


CHAPTER I. 

THE WAR. ITS HORRORS. ORIGIN AND END 

FULFILMENT OF PROPHECY. REAL CAUSE 

OF JEWISH CHASTISEMENT. DISPERSION. 

THOUGHTS ON THE TALMUD. 

It is with emotions of actual relief and gladness that we 
leave to other works the details of that awful war, during the 
continuance of which 1,356,460 of our hapless countrymen 
perished, and 101, *700 graced as prisoners the triumph of the 
Roman emperor and his son ; and this calculation relates only 
to the period of the destruction of Jerusalem : the thousands 
and thousands of men, women, and children, who fell victims to 
after massacres, are not included. 

As a History of the Women of Israel, we need not linger on 
details which our own historian, Josephus, and yet more pow- 
erfully, ii. all the eloquence of modern writing, Milman has 
brought so vividly before us, save to give one shuddering glance 
on what must have been the anguish, the tortures, of the female 
children of the Lord at that awful period. Every social tie — 
mother, daughter, sister, wife — must every hour have been sub- 
ject to the agony of such bereavement as we can but faintly 
image now. We see, by both Isaiah and Ezekiel, that the sins 
of the women had added to the weight of national iniquity ; 
but still all were not sinful, all were not rebellious. Countless 
thousands of those that fell were true to their God and His 
law. The service of the Temple, the daily offerings, were con- 
tinued in the very midst of the most horrible internal dissen- 
sions and outward siege ; and not only men armed for battle, 
but the aged and the feeble, the loveliest and the most unpro- 
tected female, the stripling youth and the tender child, sought 


279 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


the temple-courts to worship, and often by the very altar found 
their deaths. What, in this dark epoch, would have supported 
the Hebrew female, and given her strength to witness misery, 
suffer torture, and then die ? what but an assurance of that 
immortality, wherein the distinction between the righteous and 
the wicked should be discerned, and all of this world’s agony 
be swallowed up in an eternity of bliss ? 

In shrinking from the pages of horror which relate the Jew- 
ish war, we sometimes forget to bring forward in its deserved 
light the noble and exalted patriotism fiom which the awful 
struggle sprang. In our last period, we have endeavored to 
give some idea of the enslaving and savage nature of the 
Roman government over the provinces of Judea. A reference 
to the historians of the period will make it clearer still. From 
Herod, falsely called the Great, originated, as we have seen, the 
Roman subjection of Judea, and the denationalizing of the 
Jewish people. But all of nationality, all of patriotism, had 
not merged into the slavish subjection which the persecuting 
cruelty of the Roman governors seemed determined to enforce. 
In the very face of crushing tyranny and inward depression, the 
Hebrew people rose as one man to throw off the yoke of Rome 
— Rome, the mistress of the world, Empress of a thousand 
cities, of a hundred provinces, each one larger and more mighty 
than the unprotected land whose daring sons held forth the 
banner of rebellion, and dared to strike for freedom ! It was 
not Rome who commenced the struggle. She would have 
laughed to scorn the 'very idea that Judea could lead armies to 
subject her, when her officers and troops already held the land. 
No — it was the Jews themselves. And who after this shall 
accuse us of tacit submission, of wanting in courage, patriotism, 
spirit, all that makes the warrior ? Had we succeeded, we too 
should have been held up as examples of man in his noblest 
nature, even as the Swiss under Tell, the Scotch under Wallace 
and Bruce, and the Americans of a later day ; for, when com- 
pared with the Hebrews’ struggles for liberty and soil, how faint 
and feeble were the efforts of these modern lands ! But the 
exalted origin of the Jewish war is lost in its awful close. We 
could not succeed ; for it was the Lord who fought against us 
through the Roman swords, in just chastisement for national 
iniquity, and in fulfilment of His prophecy by Moses. Still let 
not our s» ns forget that their ancestors alone dared brave the 


PERIOD VII. THE WAR. 


279 


.nighty force of imperial Rome — their ancestors alone so fought 
for freedom that mightier armies than were needed for the 
reduction of any other province were summoned against them. 
Aye, and that, had not the wrath of the Eternal worked against 
them, in the division of themselves, and in the awful fulfilment 
of the threatenings which they had disregarded, Judea would 
have been unconquered still. 

One important fact it is necessary to notice here. Our young 
sisters, no doubt, have often read and heard (for it is impossible 
to peruse Gentile historians of the time without such impres- 
sions), that the awful occurrences of the war, the destruction of 
our glorious Temple, and banishment from our Holy Land, all 
were occasioned, not by our departure from the law of God, 
and manifold national transgressions, but from our obstinate 
rejection of Jesus, when he came for our salvation. Now, with 
out an intimate knowledge of our history during the continu- 
ance of the Second Temple, this might be a startling argument. 
We see that we are dispersed ; we read of all the miseries and 
massacres which have befallen us ; of the omens and prodigies 
that preceded the destruction of the Temple. We are told by 
eager Gentile acquaintance, or read in their books, that so Jesus 
prophesied, and that he wept when he looked on Jerusalem, fore- 
seeing all the calamities about to ensue because the people rejected 
him ; and unless we know another cause for all these things, 
how are we to answer ? 

And yet how easy is the true reply ! A very cursory glance 
over our history, from the return from the Babylonish Captivity, 
even if we go no further than the death of Herod, will bring 
glaringly before us the awful sins for which we are thus 
punished. Even in the brief sketch which we have given at the 
commencement of our Sixth Period, we surely must trace the 
national departure from the pure law of Moses, the assimilation 
with other nations, the entire forgetfulness that we were to be a 
“ nation of priests, holy unto the Lord” — the awful deeds of 
parricide and massacre devastating the houses of those very 
princes chosen as the Lord's anointed priests : and even had 
we but the reign of Herod, we read a sufficiency of sin to hurl 
down on us the threatened chastisement of the Eternal. The 
period between the first and second Captivity was granted us 
as a period of trial, whether or not we would return with our 
whole hearts unto the Lord. The twenty-eighth chapter of Deu 


280 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


teronomy, with its sublime and startling prophecy, was ours then 
even as it is now. We had already felt the wrath of the Lord : 
and the power to return to Him and to His law, or to reject 

them, H 3 mercy had planted in our hearts. If man had no 
power of himself to keep the law of God, as the Gentiles teach, 

then, indeed, would the law have been instituted in mockery, 
not in love, to destroy not to save ; and there could have been 
no need for the sublime prophecy of Moses. This is not the 
work to dilate on the twenty-eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, as 
inclination might prompt. We can only beseech our readers 
to turn to it themselves — to observe the blessings promised for 
obedience — the curses threatened on the disobedient — to com- 
pare the history of Israel during the continuance of the Tem- 
ple, with the first fourteen verses of the chapter, and reflect 
if such blessings could be ours ; and then from the fifteenth 
to the end of the chapter : and do we need more to instruct 
us in the nature of our sins — and the wherefore they were 
punished ? 

“ But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the 
voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all His command- 
ments and His statutes, which I command thee this day, that 
all these curses shall come upon thee and overtake thee.” This 
single verse is all-sufficient to overturn every Gentile argument. 
The prophecy which it precedes is so exact a description of all 
that took place in Jerusalem, before its siege by the Romans, 
during the siege, and afterwards, in the various lands where we 
were scattered, that it would seem as if it must have been writ- 
ten by an eye-witness, or after those events took place — not by 
an historian, living hundreds and thousands of years before. 
This single chapter is sufficient to prove the truth of the Bible, 
Judaism, and God. The description of the siege may in a slight 
degree be applicable either to the first or second destruction of 
the Temple ; but, as a whole, it refers only and solely to the 
destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, and the final dispersion of the 
Jews. 

Let not, then, the impressions derived from Gentile historians, 
so confine the youthful Hebrew mind, as to conceal for a single 
instant the real reason for our past miseries and present disper- 
sion. We were , we are , chastised, not for rejecting Jesus, but 
for long, long years of disobedience to our law. We are chas- 
tised for those national and individual crimes and sins, recorded 


PERIOD VII. THE WAR. 


281 


m our history during the continuance of our Second Temple — 
not for refusing belief in Jesus. If omens and prodigies did 
precede the destruction of the Temple, might not Nature have 
been equally moved with horror for the fate threatening the 
Jewish people for their manifold sins , as for a single one ? Jesus 
wept when he thought on the calamities of Jerusalem ; but this 
only proves, that, like every other Jeio , he was well acquainted 
with the prophecy of Moses, and, in the supremacy of national 
sin, beheld its near fulfilment — wholly and entirely distinct from 
their treatment of himself. 

Surely, then, the Gentile arguments, as to the cause of our 
dispersion, must fall harmless to the ground, a knowledge of 
our own history being all that is required to supply us with 
defence.* 

The war itself lasted but five years ; but the miseries and 
massacres of the Jews commenced almost from the death of 
Herod, and continued, with little cessation, long after Jerusalem 
was destroyed. In every Roman province where they took 
refuge, they were almost universally massacred, either from some 
fancied insult, or revolt among themselves, or from the determi- 
nation of the Romans to sweep them from the earth. The 
Greeks joined in this universal persecution — their only point of 
cordial union with the Romans seeming, in fact, to be their 
detestation of and cruelty towards the exiles of the Lord. The reign 
of Adrian threatened them with almost as complete an extermina- 
tion as tb sir expulsion from their land. Yet still they lived on, 
endowed, it seemed, with an undying vitality, which neither 
cruelty, nor suffering, nor death in its most awful shape, could 
extinguish. Nor was it the race only, which was preserved, but 

* Oar opponents will, no doubt, urge, that it was to redeem us from 
those very sins, dilated on above, that Jesus came ; and had we accepted 
him, our punishment, in the destruction of our beautiful city, and banish- 
ment from our Holy Land, would have been averted. This, sounds well : 
but as no such condition whatever was annexed, as a saving clause, to the 
prophetic threatenings of Moses, in chapter twenty-eight of Deuteronomy., 
we can neither accept nor allow it. Had the Eternal ordained and requir- 
ed this acceptance of Jesus, He would have inspired Moses to insert, at 
the end of verse fifteen, chapter twenty-eight, “ But it shall come to pass, 
if thou wilt not hearken, &e . — nor accept the salvation that 1 offer through 
the atonement of the Saviour whom I will send.” But as there are no 
euch conditions, the cause of all that has befallen us originates in the 
twful disobedience to the “ voice of the Lord our God,” snd disobedience 
5o the law which He gave through Moses. 


282 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


ihe religion. Wherever they were, in whatever circumstances, 
either of prosperity or adversity, oppression or partial freedom, 
still they were Jews — more earnest, more hearty, more resoluto 
followers of their law, than they had been when outward cir 
cumstances might have permitted its strictest observances. 

It was not until the reign of Antoninus Pius, that the miseries 
of the Hebrews subsided into a partial calm, and privileges were 
granted them throughout Italy and the various provinces of 
Rome, which enabled the patriarch of Tiberias to obtain such 
freedom and power in the observance of his religion, as to be 
recognised by the whole Jewish nation, wherever scattered, as 
their supreme head and spiritual sovereign. 

It was under his mild jurisdiction, that the Rabbins or learned 
men crept from their hiding-places, and resumed the study of 
the law. From them, at various times, emanated many of the 
minor ordinances and learned explanations of the written word, 
which were afterwards collected and compiled under the different 
names of Gemara, Mishna, and, later, the Talmud. The syna- 
gogues may also be said to have arisen from this period. 
Wherever there were ten Jews, there was a synagogue, with its 
books of the written law, and teachers ; and its galleries for the 
accommodation of the Hebrew females, that they too might 
partake the spiritual instruction and privileges offered to their 
brethren. 

Over all the provinces of the great Empire, the Hebrew race 
extended ; and from them penetrated all over Europe, and into 
the far-off countries of China, Malabar, other parts of the East 
Indies, the coast of Africa, and places equally remote, where 
their very origin is plunged in mystery. In China, their syna 
gogue we are told much more resembles the ancient Temple, 
than any of those in Europe. In Malabar, there are both black 
and white Jews, the former most probably either the descendants 
of black slaves or converts. In Bokhara and Persia, particularly 
in the cities of Ispahan and Shiraz, Rashan and Yezd — in 
Mesopotamia, Assyria, Damascus, Arabia, Egypt, Cairo, the 
©orders of Abyssinia, Morocco ; — in all these places the 
Hebrews found resting ; precarious and uncertain indeed, but 
there they still continue to exist. In all the different kingdoms 
of Europe (except Norway, in which country we never remem* 
ber seeing them mentioned), they have lived, flourished, been 
persecuted and expelled, recalled and protected. In Spain alone* 


PERIOD VII. THE WAR. 


283 


ths edict of expulsion never appears to have been recalled ; but, 
as if in direct manifestation of the protecting arm of that gracious 
Providence, who had ordained the eternal existence of His people, 
the very year of their banishment from Spain, Christopher 
Columbus discovered that new continent, which was to be to 
them a home of more perfect freedom and peace than they had 
enjoyed since their dispersion. In America, persecution never 
assailed — expulsion never banished. In Spain, they had acquir- 
ed a greater degree of learning, influence, and power, than in 
any other European nation ; and such they might equally obtain 
in that land, which appeared to be called from the deep, at the 
voice of the Creator, to provide them a home where neither 
oppression nor even civil disabilities can check the same advance 
of mind and species, to which in Spain, and in Spain alone, they 
had attained. Surely, this consideration ought to weigh deeply 
in the minds of our brethren across the Atlantic, and, inciting 
them to rise superior to the worldly dreams and time-seeking 
pursuits of the age, urge them to make manifest to the world 
what freedom and equality will make the Jew. 

It would be an interesting and curious study, to endeavor to 
trace the first colonies of the Hebrews in all these varied 
lands ; though, from the utter absence of all authentic docu- 
ments, we fear the task, however interesting, would be impossi- 
ble. We seem only to know, that in every quarter of the globe 
God has placed witnesses in simple fulfilment of His unalterable 
word. In the North and in the South, in the East and in the 
West, there we are, and there we shall be, until that glorious 
day, when the same mighty word which sent us forth will recall 
us to the land of our fathers — when, for our path, the moun- 
tains shall be laid low and the valleys exalted, and the tongue 
of the Red Sea shall be dried up, and the crooked shall be 
made straight, and the rough places plain, and in Jerusalem the 
glorious Temple be upraised from the dust, as the visioned eye 
of Ezekiel saw and prophesied, in the sublime description con- 
tained in the last eight chapters of his book. 

Wo cannot doubt that these things will be, when we 
behold, by our residence in every land, what has been and 
what is, and remember, that the same word which prophesied 
the past, whose fulfilment we have seen, hath prophesied the 
future, whose fulfilment we must equally behold, and believe 
even while it be deferred. 


284 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


The history of the Jews, as a body, however, enters not intc 
the plan of the present work ; nor shall we even dwell upon it 
as long as we did in our previous Period. From the siege of 
Jerusalem, our history is very much more generally known, than 
during the period between the return from Babylon and the 
final dispersion. We still trace the effects of the one in our 
present condition, and in the frequent mention of us in modern 
history, the other is but too often entirely forgotten, or only 
thought upon as blended with the records of Syria, Greece, Rome, 
and the final siege. 

Our task rests with the Women of Israel ; and of them we 
have unhappily so little mention, either as individuals or as a 
body, in modern times, that we can add but little to our 
previous pages. Yet that little, trifling as it may seem, 
on a superficial consideration, is of real importance to the con- 
firmation of our asserted point, the perfect freedom and equality 
of the Hebrew female. 

We shall not find her wanting in any single point which con- 
stitutes the fit recipient and promulgator of a persecuted creed, 
or shrinking, as her physical weakness might portend, from 
any suffering, even that most agonizing — the bereavement of 
her children, by her own or their father’s hand, could they thus 
only be saved from the denial of her God. Could any 
woman have done this, have looked on the pitiless murderers 
of all she loved, and then by cruel tortures calmly shared 
their fate ; had she been deprived, as our opponents in their 
ignorance declare, of the belief in, and hope of, the bliss and rest 
of immortality ? 

Before, however, we bring forward instances of female mar- 
tyrdom, there is one subject which, though we approach it with 
reluctance, from the opposition and wilful misconception which 
it is likely to produce, we desire to bring most strongly before 
our readers. It is the supposition of many amongst the Gen- 
tiles, and we fear amongst some few of ourselves, that it is the 
Talmud which, promoting the spirit of the Mosaic law, author- 
izes, nay commands, the degradation and enslaving of the 
Jewish female. In confirmation of this theory, there are many 
zealous conversionists who bring forward, as translations from the 
Talmud, detached verses and portions, which appear so strongly 
to support their assertion, as to prevent all reply. Now it 
should be well remembered, both by ourselves and our eppo- 


PERIOD VII. THE TALMUD. 


285 


nents, that much which is called the Talmud, and supposed to 
be coeval with its original venerable compilers, are the specula- 
tions, inquiries, and even ordinances of much later writers, 
whose opinions were no doubt often biassed (though uncon- 
sciously) by the habits and customs of their own darkened age. 
Let us first consider the origin and real intent of these most 
venerable and often falsely abused forms. Divine they are not. 
There are, we think, comparatively but few now, who will place 
them, in point of divinity and dignity, with the written oracles 
of God ; for if they are, why do we not see the same honor 
and reverence paid to them, as to the sacred i oils, whose 
dwelling is the House of God, and whose appearance and eleva- 
tion in the sight of the assembled multitude, cause the congre- 
gation simultaneously to rise, in silent homage to their inspired 
author ? 

When expelled from their own land — banished into every 
quarter of the globe — the temple service and worship, exactly 
as Moses had ordained, was impossible.* The sacrifices were 
compelled to cease ; for the fire from heaven consumed them no 
longer as in the First Temple ; nor, as in the Second, were there 
courts and altars for the sacrifices ; nor flocks and herds in pos- 
session of the Israelites to offer up. The multitudes, more 
eager than ever, from their state of adversity and trial, to 
return to the Lord their God, and once more obey that holy 
law, which, when it was in their power to obey, they had totally 
disregarded, beheld the opportunity so to do gone from them, 
Morning and evening, sabbaths and holidays, they had been 
accustomed U offer sacrifice and prayer. In case of singular 
vows, of thanksgiving, or penance, in every circumstance of life, 
they had a high priest to whom to resort, a Temple where to 
come, offerings ordained by Moses, and laws and statutes 
entering into every man’s household, and guiding not only his 
spiritual and social but his domestic life. But these laws and 
ordinances were for Israel when an independent state, subjects 
of God alone, and in possession of lands and their produce — 
flocks, herds — all of which were absolutely necessary for exact 
obedience to the law. In their banishment, how could they be 
guided in exact accordance with the pure law of Moses ? At 


* For these remarks on the Talmud, and supposition of its use and 
©lent, the author alone is answerable. 


286 


T H £ WOMEN Oi 


SR A EL. 


first perusal, they must have been almost appalled at the man i 
ordinances which they could not observe ; yet, on a second study 
of the holy books of Moses, and comparing them with the pro 
phets, they must have seen, that obedience, as far as lay in their 
power, in their several lands of exile, was imperatively demand- 
ed from them ; that their only hope of restoration and salva- 
tion was in a faithful adherence to the God and law of their 
fathers, and a firm faith in His promised mercy, to strengthen 
and purify man’s feeble efforts, and render them acceptable to 
him. 

But how were they to obey ? Eager and earnest m their 
repentance and desire to return to their God, now that the long- 
threatened chastisement had fallen, they welcomed with rejoicing 
the efforts of holy and good men to lay down a path of 
obedience which, even in their exile and in the midst of persecu- 
tion, they might tread. Hence arose those ordinances which are 
accused of clogging with dead and soulless weight the pure and 
spiritual Law of God ; but which, in those fearful eras of exile 
and persecution, bound Jew to Jew, and with God’s protecting 
blessing, saved His religion from amalgamation with othei 
nations, and all adoption of the Gentile creeds. But the holy 
men who originally raised the protecting casket around the 
beautiful jewel of their faith, never either preached or intended 
that their ordinances were to be considered divine or perpetual 
It was to preserve the purity, the spiritual purity, of their Law 
unsullied, when circumstances must otherwise have crushed 
it (we are writing humanly, not alluding to the Divine Guardian, 
who would always have preserved us from annihilation), not 
to take its place and be considered in the same unalterable 
and changeless light with wdiich we look on the law of God. 
Circumstances might demand the modification, even the altera- 
tion, of some of these Rabbinical statutes ; and could their 
wise and pious originators have been consulted on the subject, 
they would have unhesitatingly adopted those measures most 
likely to advance and aid spiritual improvement, even if to 
do so demanded a modification of some of their previously insti- 
tuted statutes. We have but to glance over the life and writing* 
of the great Maimonides to prove this assertion. 

To the speculative theorists, students, and additional com- 
pilers of the middle ages, be it remembered, we do not allude. 
The great mischief v 7 hich has befallen out people, in the 


PERIOD VII — THE TALMUD. 


287 


supposed superiority of form over spirit — the ordinances of the 
Talmud over those given by Moses, and explained by the 
prophets — originates not in the first venerable compilers of the 
Talmud at the time of our dispersion, but in the writers of the 
middle ages, whose minds were darkened by the bloody ashes 
of persecution, who beheld all of spirituality apparently about tc 
succumb before the awful darkness and abasement in which 
misery had plunged the mass ; and who, in consequence, multi- 
plied forms to guard them still more strictly from assimilation 
with their persecutors. And all those laws in which the fierce 
exclusiveness, so contrary to the spirit of love pervading the law 
of God, is founded, owe their origin to the same source. Oppo- 
nents would do well to remember this, and, when they point to 
vows and laws which appear to contradict the law of God, 
apply them to their only source, not the disobedience of the 
Jew, but the persecution of the ^Gentile, and the dark misery 
thence ensuing. 

But in our first dispersion, eagerly and rejoicingly the people 
listened io and observed the mild protecting ordinances of their 
spiritual teachers. In their banishment and misery, they beheld 
the awful fulfilment of the Eternal’s word ; and remembering 
the beneficent mercy and forbearance which they had scorned, 
turned in deep repentance once more to their God. Their con- 
science, their earnest longings, to prove repentance by obedience, 
found rest and peace in the steady observance of ordinances 
which in their captive state they could obey, and which brought 
down the spiritual religion of their own bright land to the 
homes and synagogues of their captivity. These ordinances, 
and the spiritual supremacy of the Rabbins, became even the 
more necessary, as the Christian and then the Mahomedan 
religions spread. It was comparatively easy to separate them- 
selves from the idolatrous abominations of the Heathen ; but 
when they were thrown sometimes amongst the followers of the 
Nazarene, acknowledging the same God and the same moral 
iaw — at others, with the followers of Mahomed, proclaiming tho 
unity of God, observing the same covenant of Abraham, having 
some belief in Moses, and refusing the same interdicted food — 
the necessity of increased exclusiveness and care of the great 
mass of the people, who were in much too degraded and 
enslaved a position to realize the superior spirituality and truth 
of their own religion, became more and more evident, and gav« 
24 


288 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


uur wise men still greater power and authority than they had 
originally sought. The multitudes scattered in every land, and 
liable to every insult and persecution, had neither the oppor- 
tunity nor the mind to study for themselves, and were glad to 
follow unquestioningly in the path laid down. 

If we impartially consider our position in the long centuries 
of persecution, we surely cannot wonder even if inward spiritu- 
ality did in some degree give place to outward form. To 
realize the former as our God demands, requires a position of 
comparative freedom — a breathing space, as it were — to culti- 
vate all those refining and elevating emotions which enlarge and 
spiritualize the soul. In many countries the Hebrew was sunk 
to a lower and more degraded position, than even (we will not 
say the slaves) the very beasts of the soil. If, in those eras, 
they had not had some ordinances which they could obey, with- 
out even caring to know the wherefore, how could their religion 
have been preserved ? We allude merely to those brief calms 
in their lives, when the sword of slaughter, though hovering 
over them, was still sheathed. At those times the mass might 
have appeared only to possess and value the casket, not the 
jewel ; but where the hovering sword fell, and multitudes were 
doomed to the dread alternative o f death, or denial of their 
God, then did the immortal glory of the jewel flash through the 
encircling casket, and endow them with the pure spirit of hope 
and faith which gave them strength to die ! Mere blind 
adherence to instituted forms could never have done this. The 
spirit of their holy religion was breathed into every breast, 
invisible and unfelt in the sluggish depths' of daily misery and 
constant fear, but bursting into life at the first call, and endow- 
ing with that firm belief in immortality which alone creates the 
martyr. 

Those periods, then, in our history, in which the spirit of the 
Mosaic law seems lost in multiplied and weighty forms, cannot 
be charged to the ordinances of our ancient fathers, but to the 
still sluggish indifference which ever follows extreme excitement, 
Accustomed through so many centuries to anticipate and endur3 
only persecution and slavery, it required a very long interval for 
the Israelites even to realize the belief that there were actually 
some countries in which they might live in perfect freedom and 
equality with thfir Gentile neighbors, and, consequently, that 
something more was demanded from them than mere adherence 


PERIOD VII. THE TALMUD. 


280 


«o instituted forms because so did their fathers. No longer 
called upon to suffer , the spirit within them so slept, that they 
oecame at length almost unconscious of its existence ; and if 
asked the wherefore they observed such forms, and what was 
the origin of their belief, they might have found it difficult to 
-eply. From this unnatural stagnation many Christians 
formed the opinion that the religion of the Jew was a mere 
spiritless formula, unenlightened by a single ray of immortal 
hope or spiritual faith, forgetting that the very evil they con- 
demn, originated in the persecution of their own ancestors, not 
in the religion of the Jews. 

The period of this stagnation is now, however, almost extinct 
rt had but its appointed time ; and though in some lands i\ 
till too oppressively exists, yet wherever the Hebrew is free a 
new spirit is awakening, giving precious promise of that time 
when spirit and form shall be re-united, as the God of Love 
ordained, the one aiding the other, till that perfection is attained, 
which, with the purifying blessing of the Lord, will lead us to 
our own dear land, and permit us once more to be His own. 


CHAPTER II. 

ORDINANCES AND TALES OF THE TALMUD, RELAT- 
ING TO THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

Having thus briefly glanced over the real origin, intent, and 
meaning of the Talmudic Ordinances, we will return to the point 
whence we started, and ascertain whether or not our venerable 
sages so completely contradicted the spirit of the law of Moses, 
as to hint, countenance, or ordain the degradation of the Hebrew 
female. For this purpose, we will transcribe a few of the rabbi- 
nical maxims, with which we have been favored by the kindness 
of the friend already referred to, whose sound knowledge of tlm 
Hebrew, both Biblical and Talmudical, and deep research, render 
his information on the subject indeed invaluable. The Hebrew 


290 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


Review, and one or two other casual notices in divine history, 
have also enabled us to form an opinion : but the Talmud itself 
should be its foundation ; and from that we, as a female, are 
unhappily debarred. 

We must refer once more, though unwillingly, to the Naza- 
rene assertion, that their religion was the first, and is the only 
one, which provides for women. “ For woman never would , 
and never could have risen to her •present station in the social 
system, had it not been for the dignity with which Christianity 
invested those qualities peculiarly her own,' 1 etc.* We can quite 
understand and sympathize in the Christian woman’s love foi 
her own faith, and heartfelt eloquence in the privileges it 
assures her. We can quite understand — when she compares 
her lot with that of the Heathen and Mahomedan, and remem- 
bers, that had it not been for the wider spread of Christianity, 
her fate w, uld still have been the same — the glow of mind and 
heart, which must infuse her whole being, and naturally be 
reflected in her writings ; but then, in her eloquent appeal to 
young countrywomen to remember what they owe to Chris- 
tianity, let her not be so unjust as to count the Jewish religion 
amongst those in which woman, in her clinging and truly 
feminine character, is uncared for and unvalued. The moral 
laws to. which she owes her privileges, came from us, and us 
a'one. Who were the apostles and preachers ? Who went 
about, giving the Heathen a knowledge of Israel’s God, though 
they disregarded the ceremonial law ? Who but Hebrews 

* Woman’s Mission, page 140. We should not lay so much stress 
upon this point, were such observations as those quoted above confined 
to conversation. But when we see such sentiments as are contained in 
page3 140, 141, and 142, of a work, which, from its deserved popularity, 
is disseminated, not only over our England, but, no doubt, over many 
ether countries, how can we pass such charges by 1 Did the authoress 
not allude to the Jews, we should not feel the necessity of noticing it so- 
imperative, but when even the religion of the people of God is included 
in such false and sweeping assertions (see page 142), we should be failing 
in either respect or love for our own holy faith, did we not endeavor to 
remove the impression. Many of our young sisters are acquainted with 
the really excellent little work in question, and unless well guarded, by 
finding all that the authoress urges in support of Christianity in their own 
holy faith, are likely to be startled and annoyed by what appears so 
plausible ; the more so from the justice and moderation and truth of th« 
previous chapters. In writing for our own sex, we are not authorized in 
lofusing to notice such mistaken charges. 


PERIOD VII. TALMUDIC PRECEPTS. 291 


whose whole minds and hearts were imbued, not with new doc* 
trines, but with the Hebrew moral law, which they disseminated 
in their wanderings, in such simple language as was bgst fitted 
for the long-darkened understandings of the Heathen whom 
they addressed ? Jesus himself was a Jew, and every word 
which he preached or said in regard to morality, even his para- 
bles themselves, have their foundation in the commentaries of 
the Jewish elders on the written law. We cannot trace a single 
moral statute throughout the New Testament, which is new, or 
even simplified to us. What may seem obscure, from the pure 
spirituality of the words of Moses, our venerable sages explain 
in language so simple and expressive, that the most obtuse could 
not fail to understand. While, then, we willingly acknowledge 
that every Gentile nation, under the mild, equitable influence of 
Christianity, has every reason to love and venerate the religion 
it upholds, and that every Christian woman would be wanting 
alike in honesty and enthusiasm, did she not consider her lot as 
blessed above that of every other Gentile land, let her not throw 
a slur upon the females of that holy faith, from whose privileges 
her own have sprung , and for whose safety, protection, guidance, 
and elevation for the obtaining and encouraging all the loveliest 
and most feminine attributes of her sex, the Most High himself 
deigned to lay down laws, disregard to which was disobedience 
to himself. 

This argument we have already treated at length in our 
Second Period, where we brought forward every statute relative 
to the Hebrew female, which our great lawgiver wrote down. 
In the succeeding Periods, even after we left the records of the 
Bible for the later history of Josephus, we have shown, and we 
believe somewhat satisfactorily, how those laws were followed by 
the influence and treatment of the females of Judea, even when 
the pure law was almost lost in the national anarchy reigning, 
with little intermission, during the continuation of the Second 
Temple. 

Surely this ought to be sufficient, even for those who declare 
that modern Judaism is distinct from, and even opposed to, the 
Judaism of the Bible, and that the Talmud is the cause. Wo 
do not think that the New Testament itself can bring forward a 
more touching and beautiful ordinance than the following : — 
“ Make allowance for the weakness of thy wife ; and if thou 
eanst not raise her to thee, do thou stoop, and speak encourag- 


292 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


mgly to her” — or, “If thy wife be of small stature, stoop, and 
Bpeak gently to her.” Again, “ Ever be zealous for the honor 
of thy wife ; for there is no blessing found in a man’s house, 
which comes not through his wife.” 

To love their wives was natural ; therefore love is not so much 
insisted upon as honor and respect. “ Hold your wives in high 
respect, and you will be rich indeed ;” but how could a man 
respect his wife, if her domestic and social position were degraded 
and enslaved ? Again, “ A man should honor his wife more 
than himself, and love her as he does his own person.” Here 
love is valued less than honor, because we may love an inferior 
being. We can only respect and honor superior virtue and 
elevated qualities ; and this statute could never have proceeded 
from men accustomed to look on their wives in the light of 
inferiors, or in any single point but on an equality with them- 
selves. 

“ Whoever marries a woman for money alone, will not have 
children according to his wishes,” because the ancient fathers 
looked on “ Woman’s mission” to be principally the education 
of her family, an idea borne out by the whole history of the 
Jews, in the particular mention of the mothers of kings, and 
other exalted persons. “ A man should beware of marrying 
the daughter of an uneducated man ; for should he die, or be 
banished, his children must remain uneducated, their mother 
being unacquainted with the glory of education.” An equal 
care is taken for the comfort and respect due to an educated 
wife. “ A man should give his daughter to an educated man, 
for no disgrace or strife enters the house of a man of education.” 
Now were the Hebrew wife a mere cypher in the household, 
what could it signify on whom she was bestowed? Exactly in 
accordance with the spirit of the Mosaic Law, the duties pre- 
scribed by the Talmud towards mothers are of equal weight and 
force as towards the fathers ; even more, for if a son see his 
mother and hither either imprisoned or in danger, he is bound 
to save his mother even before his father — a natural and an 
affecting ordinance; for the latter is supposed, from greatei 
physical strength and mental energy, to be more easily enabled 
to save himself, while the weakness and delicacy of the mother 
rendered her entirely dependent on her son. The law of God 
commanded the same honor to be paid the mother as the fathei 
(see Seojnd Period — laws for mothers), and the venerable com 


PERIOD VII. TALMUDIC PRECEPTS. 293 


ailers of the Talmud departed not one item from its spirit ; thus 
upholding the moral and social dignity of women, even had 
there been no other law. That the mother , as well as the chil- 
dren, were to honor the father of a family, surely cannot be 
twisted into a degrading ordinance. Unhappy, indeed, is the 
woman of any creed, rank, or country, who cannot, with her 
whole heart, mind, and sou), honor the father of her children 
— the husband of her choice 1 

The laws for the widows and the fatnerless also, on which 
we laid so much stress, as marking the care for woman by the 
Mosaic law, in our Second Period, we find commented upon by 
3ur ancient fathers, so exactly in the pure spirit of the Divine 
ordinance, that we cannot resist transcribing the whole passage. 

“ Be very careful in the treatment of widows and orphans, 
not merely if they be poor ; but because their spirits be broken , 
though they be ever so rich. Even the widow of a king, and 
his orphans, demand that carefulness. For it is said, ‘ All 
widows and orphans shall ye not oppress.’ Let the manner of 
addressing them be kind ; do not burden them with labor, or 
oppress them with harsh words. Let their property be more 
precious to thee than thine own ; for he that offends or oppresses 
them, and injures their property, is an evil-doer, and his punish- 
ment is expressed in the law : ‘ And my anger shall break ou* 
against you,’ &c. (Exodus xxii. 24.) The Holy One, blessed 
be He, has vouchsafed to grant them a particular covenant, 
that when they invoke Him against their oppressors, they shall 
be heard, as it is said, ‘ When they call up to me I will hear 
them, for I am merciful.’ ” (Ex. xx. 23.) 

The prohibition to offend them is, however, only in cases 
where it may cause them injury : but when it is for their good ; 
as for instance, where a teacher is to instruct them in the law, 
or in his trade, it is a duty to reprove them ; nevertheless, a 
distinction ought to be made in their favor, and they should be 
treated with greater forbearance than other pupils, so as to 
instruct them mildly, with great patience and attention ; for it is 
said, the Lord will defend their cause,” &c. (Psalm cxl. 12.) 
Whether the child have lost father or mother, it is alike called 
an orphan, until it attains an age to protect itself.* And this 

* Extracted from the Hebrew Review, pp. 60 and 61. Thence taken 
from Morality of the Talmud. Hilchoth Deoth (Ethic Precepts) Piv, 
vi sect. 10. 


294 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


at once proves that the Hebrew mother was even on a more 
hckuowledged equality with the father than in any other nation ; 
for we believe that orphans in general mean those who have 
kst both parents, or a father only. 

We think, if we look the world over, and examine every 
religious or moral code, we shall fail to find any laws to surpass 
these ; not only in humanity, but in most exquisite tenderness 
to that bruised and broken reed, a widow of any rank or class, 
from the relict of a sovereign to the relict of a slave (so called), 
guiding not alone conduct towards her, but actually words and 
the manner of address. 

Again, we find peculiar regard paid by the Talmudists to the 
laws instituted by Moses for females of every denomination, as 
is proved by such laws as the following : “ The woman takes 

precedence of the male in being fed, clad, and freed from capti- 
vity.” Repeatedly recommending us to afford protection and 
relief to the female first , and then to the male, in strong figures, 
which are so common to Eastern idiom, it commands, “ Let thy 
table be considerably within thy means ; thy dress and appear- 
ance according to thy means ; but the comforts of thy wife and 
children beyond thy means.” 

We have already noticed the humane statutes in our law, for 
the protection and comfort of the maid servants, or female 
slaves in Israel (see Second Period) ; and that it was illegal for 
a man to transfer his Hebrew maid servant to another master. 
In exact accordance with the spirit of this beautiful ordinance, 
Tradition (or the Talmud) tells us : “ The male servant became 
free on his master’s death, provided there was no male heir ; but 
for the female servant’s release, there was no such condition.” 
Her master’s dying hour was the moment of her manu- 
mission, expressed in the Talmudic simple brevity bv the 
words ; “ The Hebrew maid servaut serves neither son nor 
daughter.” 

Here, then, even in these few and trifling extracts, we find, 
that instead of contradicting, every statute given by Moses rela- 
tive to mothers, wives, daughters, widows, and maid servants in 
Israel, is confirmed by the Talmudic precepts, and so simplified, 
that it is impossible even for wilful misconception to mistake 
their meaning. There may be many turns and points in the writings 
of our ancient sages seeming to contradict them, more especially 
in the light in which our opponents, to serve their own pur* 


PERIOD VII. TALMUDIC PRECEPTS. 295 

poses, bring them forward : but with such laws as we have 
quoted, all else is of little moment. We know that they must 
have been written by men well versed, not only in the 
ordinances but in the spirit of the law written by Moses, simply 
because of their exact accordance ; that at the time such 
precepts were collected and written, the social or domestic 
position of woman could not have been the degraded and 
frivolous one assigned in general to the females of the East. 
That the Talmud must have regarded them as companions and 
friends to their husbands — educators of their children — mis- 
tresses of their household ; and possessing, from their physical 
weakness and delicacy, such claims on the protection, tender- 
ness, and kindness, not of their relatives alone^but of their nation 
in general, which are not to be found in the moral code of any 
other people. 

What later Jewish writers, therefore, may urge upon the 
subject, if it contradict this spirit, by assigning either position, 
duties, or employments, derogatory to her as a female, a recipient 
and promulgator of the law of God, or debarring her from 
those religious and social principles which were granted her 
from the delivery of the law, and proved her own by the history 
of every Jewish female mentioned in the Bible — those laws, 
statutes, ordinances, precepts, or even allusions, can be now 
nothing worth whatever , for not only (if there be such) do they 
contradict the law, but the traditions ; not only disregard 
Moses, but the venerable fathers; and, therefore, need neither 
notice nor denial. However wise and learned may be their 
writers ; however gravely they may be weighed and given, if in 
one single instance they contradict the law of God and the tra- 
ditions of the fathers quoted above, we reject them altogether as 
neither guiding nor binding laws. Speculative theories they 
may be, probably originating from an intimate association with 
the Moors of Spain and other nations of Eastern origin and 
Moslem faith, or even the Nazarenes themselves; for, in 
the middle ages, under the darkened sway of Catholicism, 
we certainly can trace very little of the humanizing and elevat- 
ing effect of Christianity on her female votaries, to which 
the authoress of “ Woman’s Mission” so eloquently reverts. 
But speculative theories have nothing to do with a guiding 
law. The middle ages teemed with suggestive and inquiring 
spirits among the Jews. The Bible became almost a sealed 


296 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


book, from the extreme danger attendant on public perusal and 
public explanation. Debarred alike from social intercoms* 
or means of gratifying individual ambition, the study of the 
Talmud was their only resource; the hyperbolic arid orient 
figures, which we.re mingled with beautiful parables and simple 
precepts, became to the uninitiated significant of meanings never 
contemplated by the writers themselves. On these they raised 
their own theories and speculations — some reasonable, some 
fanciful, but none gifted with authority to contradict, or take 
i be place of previous laws. They swelled the multitude of 
volumes already known as the Talmud; and, there foie, when 
one word or precept is discovered which can be twisted 
into Jewish contempt of woman, not only the whole work, 
but the religion itself is contemned ; such contemners entirely 
forgetting that the mighty work they quote, is the reflection not 
of one but of very many differing minds, and that the opinions 
are either merely individual or national, according as they 
contradict or uphold, not only the ordinances, but the spirit of 
the law of Moses. 

Thus, then, even granting the existence of some portions 
in our Talmud apparently derogatory to women, they are 
of no importance, and never guided our social system : but 
often those very portions, on which our opponents argue 
most eloquently, have nothing to do with the contempt towards 
females with which they are charged. We will bring forward 
one instance to explain our meaning. 

Amongst the Hebrews, no capital punishment could be 
inflicted on the testimony of a woman ; now this is, of course, 
twisted by mistaken men into an idea that it proceeded from a 
contemptuous notion of woman’s judgment, an utter mistrust of 
her veracity, and a supposition that she was not even considered 
of sufficient consequence to take an oath, or otherwise share in 
solemn public proceedings. 

A brief glance back on the respect paid to Miriam, Deborah, 
and Huldah, must at once overthrow this idea. It would cer- 
tainly be an inconsistency not at all according to the stern sim- 
plicity of the Jewish character, to allow the mothers and wives 
in Israel “ the high prerogative of speaking in the name of 
the Eternal, obey their behests, and yet to refuse them the com- 
mon justice of being believed.” But eager zeal to promote the 
all-important object of our conversion, does not venture quite so 


PERIOD VII. TALMUDIC PRECEPTS. 29'i 

deeply. Happily we can reply by facts as strongly as by sug- 
gestions : “ It was the awful duty of the witness to bear out the 

truth of his deposition by the execution of the verdict ; and 
it was this part of the functions of a witness which the law 
nobly declared the female citizen to be unable to perform. 
Instead of being a stigma upon the character of the nation 
generally, and of their female population especially, it must, on 
the contrary, inspire us with admiration of the delicacy of feel- 
ing displayed in that enactment.”* And when we compare 
this delicacy with the manners and customs of contemporary 
nations, the superior elevation and advancement of the people of 
God must strike us very forcibly. The Hebrew female was 
debarred by a most just and humane ordinance, from even 
witnessing the shedding of human blood. Surely this is a forci- 
ble proof of the care taken in the Talmud to preserve her femi- 
nine nature in all its original gentleness and purity ; even if the 
restriction should be thought a harsh one by those females who, 
in civilized countries, may still be found accompanying the 
criminal to the place of execution, not to bear witness against 
him, but simply to satisfy their own will and pleasure by 
the sight of death. In those horrible combats between the 
hapless gladiators and the wild beasts, in polished, though 
heathen Rome, women thronged the amphitheatre. In later 
days, when Catholicism usurped the place of Heathenism, 
bull-fights arose, in which not only was an innocent animal 
tortured, but many human beings exposed to death, and yet the 
beauties of Spain would have felt it a hard restriction had they 
been prohibited from witnessing the sports. The tournaments 
themselves, if we examine them, we must confess to be scarcely 
fit scenes for women ; though we ourselves feel that, in their 
age, they must have been fraught with an excitement and 
a chivalry, from which, in the position the higher females then 
occupied, it might have seemed hard for them to be debarred. 
But in Judea, in the Hebrew commonwealth at least, we rfever 
find mention of such things. War, with its concomitants, was 
to them a necessity, not a pastime. The introduction of the 
Greek and Roman games was a source of the deepest national 
affliction, as a departure from the holy purity and refined sim- 

* Hebrew Review, vol. in. p. 22, from an article entitled, “ On the 
Administration of Justice among the Hebrews.” 


238 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


plicity inseparable from a strict adherehce to the laws of 
Moses. 

It is impossible to compare the social system of the Jews 
even with the refined notions of other nations of our own day, 
and yet not to perceive its superiority at once. Even plays 
were unknown. Actors, ballet-dancers, buffoons, were meaning- 
less terms. The holy people would surely have thought them- 
selves degraded by the very admission of such characters. Yet 
the arts and sciences were cultivated by them to a pitch of 
learning, glory, and perfection, unsurpassed, if even equalled, 
by either Greece or Rome. Music and poetry were to them 
the atmosphere they breathed ; architecture, engraying, embroi- 
dery, cunning work in every metal and in every precious stone, 
rose to a height in their One Temple, and in their palaces, and 
even houses, which modern times vainly strive to outvie. 
Painting and sculpture, as the arts we now esteem them, were 
not so much known, from the care taken to prevent the smallest 
assimilation to the idolatrous worship of the neighboring natious, 
by either in paint, wood, or stone, making the likeness of any 
thing that is in the heaven above, or the earth beneath, or the 
waters under the earth, although the cherubim which adorned 
the Ark, and the brazen bulls of the Temple, proved that even 
sculpture must have been an art well known. Dancing, usually 
common to barbarous nations, we have seen, was not such to us 
but usually made the constant accompaniment of national and 
holy rejoicings, and therefore not regarded in Israel merely as 
a frivolous pastime ; but, as the natural recreation of the young 
and happy, considered an acceptable and pleasing offering of 
loving hearts to their holy and gracious King. 

In a nation, then, so peculiarly and especially spiritualized and 
refined, if there should be some social laws respecting their 
female population which appear to give them less freedom than 
the females of other nations, it was simply to render them more 
and more worthy of sustaining that two-fold most holy character 
— mothers of Israel and daughters of the Lord. We can find 
nothing either in the Law or its commentaries, by our really 
ancient fathers, to permit the supposition that either in the 
religious, moral, social, or domestic system, we were to be 
regarded as of less importance, less responsibility, and of less 
value in the sight of our God, and of the state, than our brother 
Man. We were- -we are — equals in every spiritual privilege, 


PERIOD VII. TALMUDIC TALES. 


299 


and every social and domestic law. Man could neither degrade 
us individually, nor deprive us generally, of any privilege or 
promise given unto Israel. That he never attempted to do so 
during the continuance of Israel as a nation, we have seen ; and 
therefore, whatever statutes from the Talmud may be brought 
forward to startle us by their seeming to enslave us— we may 
rest quietly assured, first, that they might be explained away 
were the whole examined, with the same ease as those prohibit- 
ing female witnesses, which we have noticed ; second y, that 
they were probably absolutely necessary at the time they were 
given, to preserve the feminine purity, gentleness, and modesty 
of the women of Israel unsullied; and lastly, if they will not 
abide either of these tests, and are absolutely and unanswerably 
enslaving, heathenizing, and degrading, that they have founda- 
tion in neither law nor tradition, and consequently possess no 
authority, and demand no obedience — their own incongruity 
with both the history as well as the law of Israel, being quite 
sufficient for their entire rejection and utter condemnation, alike 
by the Hebrew state as by individuals. 

Precepts to insure the elevated position of the women of 
Israel were not in themselves sufficient to satisfy o.ir ancient 
fathers. Besides the historical evidence that widows of kings 
could reign in their own right in Israel, we find many most 
beautiful allusions to woman in narrations, which, even granting 
they be but tradition, could only have sprung from the generally 
received idea of woman’s dignity, gentleness, and influence, and 
also her vast capabilities of acquiring, and opportunities of using, 
the most erudite readings of the Law. VVe are told that the 
wisdom and learning of Beruria, the wife of R. Meir, were 
eceived with even more deference than those of Meir himself. 
She not ofiy understood the written word, but left three hundred 
traditions, aud is placed amongst the Tanaites, or expositors of 
the Mishna. Now, how could such an assurance be found in 
the Talmud, if religious knowledge and opportunities of deep 
and severe study were, either by a law of the state or public 
opinion, denied to woman ? It is folly to suppose it, even for a 
moment. If some modern Jewish opinions, concerning the 
impossibility of woman comprehending the Law, or the pre- 
sumption and folly of her attempting to make religion her study, 
had had existence then, why poor Beruria might have shared 
the fate of some of the hapless learned of the middle ages, who 


300 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


were persecuted and burned, simply because their minds out 
stripped their age. But the memorable chroniclers of Beruria 
knew too well both the position and the capabilities of their 
countrywomen to refuse their appreciation and reverence when 
called upon to give them. Their affection for her memory is 
proved by the touching apologues in which she is brought 
forward, in a character so essentially feminine, that it is clear 
how completely they believed in the perfect compatibility of 
learning with every womanly feeling and attribute. To our 
countrywomen the brief notices are so well known, that it 
would be needless to repeat them, did we not hope that they would 
bring the Talmudic notices of woman in a somewhat novel light 
to our Christian friends. 

Rabbi Meir appears to have been as impetuous and rash as 
his wife was gentle and judicious. Irritated at persecuting 
insults, which he had received from some sinful men in his 
neighborhood, he uttered an imprecation against them in the 
words of David : “ Let the sinners be consumed out of the 
earth, and let the wicked be no more.” “ You are wrong, my 
husband— -such was not king David’s meaning,” was the soothing 
reply. “ He prayed that sin might be consumed from off the 
earth, for then the wicked would be no more. He sought the 
destruction of sin, not of the sinners;” and, perfectly aware that 
the Hebrew quite authorized such rendering of the verse, the 
Rabbi acknowledged the justice of his wife’s rebuke. 

The other apologue of the same gentle feeling woman, is more 
generally known thro h the medium of Coleridge’s “Friend.” 
It was the custom of Rabbi Meir to attend the school and 
synagogue for several hours consecutively, often during the whole 
day — and, during one of these long absences from home, bis 
sons, boys of great promise and beauty, both died. Conquering 
the anguish of a mother in the strong affection of a wife, who 
knew the passionate love borne by the father for his offspring, 
and dreading the effect of sudden grief, she met her husband at 
supper with her usual calm and tranquil mien. He naturally 
inquired for his sons, but she skilfully evaded the question, and, 
at the conclusion of the meal, stated that she had an important 
question to ask him, the answer to which had much troubled 
her. The rabbi encouraged her to speak ; and she related, 
“ that a neighbor had lent her some jewels of inestimable value, 
*nd now required them to be returned. Ought she to give 


PERIOD VII. TALMUDIC TALES. 


301 


them back ?” Surprised, the rabbi replied, “ that surely liia 
wife needed not even to ask the question, the answer was so 
lelf-evident.” Without rejoinder, she led him into the room 
where the bodies lay, and, removing the white cloth which 
concealed them, revealed their loss. She permitted the first 
burst of agonized grief ; and then, soothingly recalling his own 
verdict, touchingly repeated, “ The Lord gave, and the Lord 
hath taken away ; blessed be the name of the Lord ?” 

Can anything be more beautifully true to woman’s nature 
than these brief tales ? Even granted they cannot be proved 
as true, but are merely traditionary ; what a high and beautiful 
sense of the female Israelite’s capability and characteristics, 
must the ancient fathers have entertained ! How contradictory 
to the modern assertion — that they degrade and enslave us, aud 
so regard us with contempt ! Accustomed to associate with 
such characters as Hannah, Abigail, Huldah, the Shunammite, 
and Esther, the sages knew that, to be highly gifted, learned, 
and wise, in a far nobler sense than the modern acceptation of 
the terms, and withal to be truly and exquisitely feminine, essen- 
tially the looman , was not the apocryphal combination which it 
is at present considered. The Talmudic writers must have 
thought highly and nobly of women, or such traits as we have 
brought forward, and those found in Hurwitz’s Hebrew Tales, 
would never have been admitted within their volumes. Their 
minds were much too solemn, and too fond of weighty research, 
to allow such flights as romantic descriptions of woman’s excel- 
lence ; which, if only accustomed to regard their mothers, wives, 
and sisters, in a degraded light, these notices and even laws 
would be. 

Surely then, even this brief and imperfect reference to the 
venerable volumes which — as reflections of some of the highest 
and the purest, the noblest and the holiest minds who ever 
labored for the good of man, and lived but to know and prove 
the glory of the Lord — we value from our very heart ; even this 
may be permitted to remove some prejudice, and convince our 
opponents and ourselves, that not a thought so contrary to the 
spirit of the law as the degrading of woman either socially or 
individually, or even the non-caring for her weakness and her 
gentle nature, the refusing of all regard to her peculiarly femi- 
nine characteristics, ever entered the hearts or minds of our 
ujges : their aim was to obey the law of God, and to provide 


302 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


for and protect her as woman. The very laws that, on a mert 
hasty reading, might seem in their strictness to interfere with 
her perfect freedom of act and will, are only evidences of theii 
desire to preserve the feminine beauty and modesty of hei 
character unsullied, and more probably instituted at those times 
when the extreme laxity and rudeness of the nations around 
rendered them absolutely necessary, to keep the “ Women of 
Israel” apart, that their holiness might never be profaned, *ven 
by casual association. 

Oh ! that we had but eloquence and influence sufficient to urge 
our brethren to engage in the glorious task of removing the dust 
and rubbish which persecution, prejudice, and ignorance, have 
gathered round the pure and simple lessons, the exquisite 
allegories and glowing diction of our ancient fathers, and to 
publish in the vernacular idiom of every land, the wisdom which 
those mighty tomes conceal ! Give us our own ! Compel us 
not, out of pure thirst, to seek the works of Gentile writers for 
commentators on the word of our God — for sympathy in our 
aspiring thoughts, for rest to our wearied souls, unable yet to 
understand the full beauty of the Bible, without some simple 
explanation which would flash light over the inspired pages, and 
so enable us to take them to our heart, and find consolation. 
Compel us not to turn to the Gentile works for these. Unseal 
the fountains of pure waters which our aged seers provided ; 
give us their renderings of the moral law ; their spirit and 
aphorisms ; their orient imagery, which, in its power and imagi- 
nation, will outvie every other. Give us their detail of Jewish 
history ; do not compel us to abide by the details of those whose 
faith is opposed to our own, who believe us blinded and degraded, 
and whose peculiar views must inspire their pages. The Hebrew 
who would do this, however gradually — who would provide our 
youth with works from our own writers, simplified, if needed, to 
their comprehension, and selected as would best meet the spirit 
of the age, would, indeed, rank among the first and noblest 
benefactors of this kind, and would prove the love which, as an 
Israelite, should b<? borne in his heart towards Israeli sons and 
Is rael’s God. 


PERIOD VII. DI3PERSION. 


303 


CHAPTER III. 

iIEECTS OF DISPERSION AND PERSECUTION 
GENERAL REMARKS. 

It would be irrelevant to our present task, besides extending 
our work to much too great a length, to attempt anv ietailed 
account of the Hebrew nation, from their dispersion to the 
present time ; the third volume of Milman’s History, and an 
admirable American work, History of the Jews, by Hannah 
Adams, commencing from the destruction of Jerusalem, and 
accompanying us through our varied destinies till some fifty 
years ago ; besides many other works in the modern languages, 
which no doubt exist, though to us they may not be known, 
will give all the needful information of us, as a people. 

One trifling incident we will, however, mention, ere we leave 
the history of the past, and conclude our work by a brief survey 
of the present. In the reign of the emperor Julian, an edict 
was issued for the re-erection of the Temple of Jerusalem on 
Mount Moriah, and the “restoration of the Jewish worship in 
all its splendor.” 

The commotion which this edict occasioned to the Jews in 
every quarter of the empire may be imagined. They crowded 
in vast numbers to Palestine, and their wealth poured forth in 
such lavish profusion, that even the tools they used were to be 
sanctified to the service by being made of the most costly 
materials — the women seconded their brethren, giving up every 
personal ornament and hoarded jewel to forward the glorious 
work. The prophets allude to the pride and folly of the women 
of Judea, loving their ornaments more than the law, as one of 
the iniquities from which Judea was to be purged ; and it would 
beern by this mention, as if the propensity had been indeed 
crushed from the hearts of the women of Israel, and that even, 
as in the time of Moses, when to adorn the tabernacle they 
brought all their ornaments and the work of their hands till 
more than enough was given, — so, now, they are equally earnest 
and enthusiastic in the holy cause. The work was indeed 


304 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


frustrated ; for the word of the Lord had passed, and the land 
was to enjoy her sabbaths and the temple remain unbuilt^ till, 
the term of exile past, repentant Israel might be recalled ; but 
the mention of the eager zeal of the women of Israel marks how 
dear and precious to them, as well as to their brother man, was 
the religion of Jerusalem ; that they must have known and felt 
that their temple service, and the law it included, gave them, 
as women, higher and nobler privileges than any other, or they 
could not have been so eager for its restoration. 

Throughout our history, in all those horrible epochs of perse 
cution, we can find not a single trace of the love of the Lord, 
and of his Holy Faith, burning with stronger and more 
enduring light, in man’s heart than in woman’s. The female 
Hebrew never shrank from any alternative however awful, which 
could save her or her children from the denial of their faith. 
Death of the most horrible kind was welcome, not only for 
themselves but (a trial far more awful) for their children, rather 
than the forcible baptism to which they were repeatedly 
exposed. No faith can bring forward a longer or more noble 
list of willing female martyrs ; and what emotion could have 
inspired this devotion? What could have so triumphed over 
the emotions of humanity — the tremblings of the mortal frame 
— but the deepest love of their holy religion, the firmest con 
viction of its immutable truth, and an unwavering belief in the 
immortality which it was the first to teach, and which could 
alone have endowed weak clinging woman with the noble 
strength and constancy which taught her how to die ? Let 
those who, in their utter ignorance of the spirit and tenets of 
the Jewish religion, dare to assert that we have no unbelief in 
the immortality of the soul, that it was neither taught by Moses 
and the prophets, nor preached and simplified by our ancient 
sages — let those, if they cannot read our venerable fathers, just 
glance back on the history of our people, and answer, what was 
it caused so many millions, women as well as men, to die rather 
than desert their faith ? What availed such sacrifice, if they 
believed this earth weve all ? What mattered their creed in 
this life, if death were annihilation ? No : our martyrs are our 
witnesses ; and we need little other proof of the universality of 
the Jewish belief in immortality, than the countless numbers 
»vho have sealed its mighty truth in their own blood. 

As our martyrs are witnesses of such belief, so are oui 


PERIOD VII. DISPERSION. 305 

existence and preservation, of the Truth of the Revelation, of 
the perpetuity of that holy faith which God Himself proclaimed 
should last for ever. Where now are the mighty nations of 
Babylon and Rome, before whose conquering arms Judea lay 
prostrate, and her children fell mingling dust with dust, or were 
scattered to every quarter of the globe like chaff before the wind ? 

Where are the mighty conquerors ? Lost amid the dim shadows 
of the past : and what are they but names which once were 
great ? But where are the conquered ? Ask of every land and 
every age ; and they will point to them as a people still, for 
ever present, never past : and what are they ? God’s people 
still — His witnesses, whom naught of earth and earthly change 
can touch. Nations and dynasties, conquerors and conquered, 
are swept from the face of the earth, leaving not a trace ; but 
the persecuted, the oppressed, the tortured, the only nation 
which has seen millions and millions fall by the destroying 
sword, and in later times beheld but too many lost by smoother, 
but even more dangerous means ; — that nation still lives, 
breathes unchanged, its ranks undiminished, its undying vitality 
seeming to receive increase of strength and firmness from every 
blow that seeks its downfall. Cemented by the blood of noble 
martyrs, supported by the pillars of divine truth, and wisdom, 
and love, it rears its head in every land, as a temple that will 
never fall, and all, man, woman, and child, who seek to love and 
obey the Lord according to His law vouchsafed to Moses, add 
to its solidity and beauty, and bear witness to its truth. 

Our existence is in itself a miracle : naught but the provi- 
dence of God could have thus preserved us ; a nation so com- 
pletely apart, that, though for more than eighteen centuries 
scattered over the whole world, and found in every land, our 
identity has never been lost, our race has never mingled, our 
religion has never changed. Our most vehement opposers grant 
us this ; but they tell us, that we worship not now as Moses 
taught ; that we are guided by the Talmud, not by God. We 
could reply, that if the one dared to contradict the other, no 
Jew would acknowledge its legality, or obey its dictates ; but 
we wish to prove, that if our manners and customs do in some 
instances appear to differ from the spirit inculcated by our 
inspired lawgiver, it is the necessary consequence of our 
captivity, foreseen by God Himself, and provided for by the 
principal statutes contained in Levit. xxvi. ver. 39 to the end, 


306 


TIIE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


and Dent, xxx., which in clear and emphatic terms laid down 
all that was necessary for our acceptance. 

Our law was given to a holy people, framed for a government 
and a nation which, in its domestic and political bearings, was 
to stand alone. When the sins and manifold rebellions of the 
children of Israel compelled their expulsion from the Holy 
Land, lost them the direct interference of their God, both by the 
Shechinah and by his prophets, and scattered them over the whole 
world, it was a part of their awful chastisement, that while the 
word of the Eternal preserved their faith and its holy ordinances 
unchanged, their social , domestic , and individual position should 
be guided no longer by the pure spirit of the Law, but by the 
spirit of the nations amongst whom they were thrown. Thus 
we always perceive that the Jews are in a measure civilized or 
barbarized, according as civilization or barbarism pervade the 
pepple amongst whom they dwell. How was it possible for 
them to retain the social and mental elevation, the pure spirit- 
ual religion, the loveliness of home which had marked them in 
their own land, when subjected to the oppression, the slavery, the 
cruelty, with which the history of the middle ages teems ; when 
moral and mental darkness was all around them, seeking also to 
crush them under the fierce persecutions, which from such mental 
and moral darkness sprang ; how could the mass retain the spirit- 
uality, the elevation of their ancestors ? Individuals there were 
no doubt, who were Israelites indeed, spiritually and mentally, 
as well as rigid adherents to every form ; but the mass must of 
necessity have shared the darkness of the oppressors under whom 
they groaned. Spiritually and mentally, social and domestic 
elevation demands and imperatively needs an atmosphere of 
equality and freedom, or they must either droop and die, or be 
shrouded in such secresy, and so closely next the heart, as to be 
entirely invisible in history. 

This is proved by our history, in what is aptly termed by 
Milman, the “ Golden Age of Judaism.” It was, indeed, of very 
short duration ; but during its continuance, we find “ the Jews 
not only pursuing unmolested their lucrative and enterprising 
traffic, not merely merchants of splendor and opulence, but sud- 
denly emerging to offices of dignity and trust, administering the 
finances of Christian and Mahomedan kingdoms, and travelling 
as ambassadors between mighty sovereigns.”* In France,, dur 

* Milman, vol. iii. p. 369. 


PERIOD VII. — DISPERSION. 307 

hig the reign of Charlemagne, “from the ports of Marseilles and 
Narbonne, their vessels kept up a constant communication with 
the East.” In Narbonne, of the two prefects (or mayors of the 
city) one was always a Jew ; and the most regular and stately 
Dart of the city of Lyons was always the Jewish quarter. The 
superior intelligence and education of the Jews, during a period 
when nobles and kings and even the clergy could not always 
write their names, pointed them out for offices of trust. They 
were the physicians, and the ministers of finance, to nobles and 
to monarchs. And in the reign of Charlemagne, “ Europe and 
Asia beheld the extraordinary spectacle of a Jew named Isaac, 
setting forth with two Christian counts, one of whom died on the 
road, as ambassador from Charlemagne to Haroun Al Raschid, 
and conducting the political correspondence between the court of 
Aix-la-Chapelle and Bagdad.”* 

In Spain, both under the influence of Moorish and Christian 
sovereigns, the golden age of Judaism endured the longest, to 
set in the deepest darkness. The long line of literary men, who 
swelled the Jewish ranks during that epoch, sufficiently mark 
the influence of freedom and prosperity upon the mind — while 
the writings of Maimonides are pretty certain evidence of their 
effect upon the spirit. In the calm and dignified repose of the 
social position which that golden age allowed him, Maimonides 
advanced so much beyond his times and country that, like all 
benefactors of their kind, he was neither understood nor appreci- 
ated by his contemporaries. But the more enlightened our 
nation has become, the more have his profound wisdom and 
spiritual revelations of the wisdom and goodness of the Deity, 
as displayed in the Law of Moses, been valued and appreciated, 
and the more they will be as the Jewish mind advances. 

The iron age, preceding the golden one, had originally 
cramped the intellectual and spiritual powers of the mass. They 
had been content and glad to tread the path laid down for 
them by their teachers, without inquiring wherefore they thus 
worshipped. Even their teachers, except a select and holy few, 
had accustomed themselves to regard the magnificent fabric of 
the Mosaic Law with silent adoration and admiring wonder ; 
but Maimonides, in his daring and all-conquering wisdom, 
looked on it with the searching light of reason, as well as the 


Mil nan’s Hist., vol. iii. p. 280 — 2?1. 


308 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


Jiving orb of faith ; and how he was spiritually rewarded, let hi* 
beautiful writings testify. His contemporaries were dazzled by 
the lustre he flung upon the meaning and intentions of the holy 
Law, and feared to approve it ; but bis labor was not lost. The 
flash, too bright to illuminate his own age,* penetrated the folds 
of the far future, and spreading gradually, found souls prepared 
to meet and welcome it, and shrine in their heart of hearts the 
glorious mind whose wisdom had kindled it to life. 

But for many, many terrible years, even the memory of tho 
golden age was buried under the dense pall of misery and 
oppression which gathered round the hapless Israelites in every 
hind, and so crushed all mental and social elevation, so confined 
the sphere of action and employment, so banished all religious 
instruction, except such as could be imparted in the deepest 
secresy, that the word Jew became and has continued synony- 
mous with all that is debased — with a bowed and bowing ser 
vility, with exacting usury, with hard exclusiveness, and with a 
merciless hatred of all mankind, and a detestation of every 
religion but his own. Aye, even now, to those who have never 
associated with us, whose only knowledge is drawn from books 
— whose authors, with but two noble exceptions,! seem to 
delight in fabling us as the Shylock of Shakspeare, the old 
clothesinan of nursery tales (noticed thus even by Miss Edge- 
worth), or as the money-lenders, interest-exactors, and dis- 
honorable adepts in all the grades of usury which abound in 
fashionable novels. And little, perhaps, do their wTiters know 
that their fictions demonstrate far more clearly the consequences 
of persecution, which their ancestors have hurled upon us, than 
the real character of the Jew, or the true spirit of his creed. 
Writers who know us not, depict us, not what we are , but what 
lingering prejudice creates us, entirely forgetting the real cause 

* Wisdom like his becomes to the unenlightened “ dark from excess 
of light.” 

t Sir Walter Scott, in his exquisite delineation of Rebecca and hei 
father ; and Mrs. S. C. Hall, in her breathing portrait of Manasseh Ben 
Israel, in the “ Buccaneer,” where she has so beautifully and skilfully 
blended all the characteristics of the Talmudic Israelite, with the emo- 
tions and virtues of a father and a man — a union which most authors 
appear to imagine incompatible. The character of Sidonia,in “ Conings- 
by,” is net a being of flesh and blood, but a type of a class ; and then* 
fore we do not include him, though the author has done us justice as s 
3 alien. 


PERIOD VII. EFFECTS OF DISPERSION. 309 

of our fallen state — the impossibility of our attaining to that 
elevated social state which freedom and peace have granted to 
other lands, while bent to the very earth, and for ever liable, even 
at this very present, to insult, ignominy, and such oppressions 
as even slavery does not know. The mischief which is done by 
such false pictures of the Jewish character in social and domestic 
life is incalculable. It not only fosters prejudice and confirms 
ignorance in our opponents, but actually causes many Jews 
themselves to tremble at the term, and to endeavor to conceal a 
faith and descent which should be their glory. Even those 
domestic narrations which portray some members of a Jewish 
family in a favorable light, that they may conclude by making 
them Christians, and the other members as so stern, harsh, and 
oppressive, that they bear no resemblance whatever to any 
Israelite, except the Israelite of a Gentile’s imagination — do but 
swell the catalogue of dangerous because false works ; and 
never fail to impress the minds of Christian readers with the 
unalterable conviction, that whenever spirituality, amiability and 
gentleness, kindliness and love, are inmates of a Hebrew heart, 
it is an unanswerable proof that that heart is verging on Christi- 
anity, and will very speedily embrace that faith. Nay, mental 
endowments themselves are welcomed as an earnest that their 
possessors must quickly desert the Jewish creed ; such supposers 
entirely forgetting that mental acquirements, the most profound 
and searching wisdom, the most vivid and beautiful imagination, 
the most elegant accomplishments, have been the heir-loom of 
the Jewish nation, from their very first election as the chosen of 
the Lord ; and that, instead of losing these endowments in their 
dispersion, all of mind and talent in the whole European and 
Asiatic world was possessed by them; and that Gentiles of 
every denomination and every creed came with humility and 
deference to them, glad to learn from the oppressed those 
glorious gifts of mind which to the oppressors were denied. 

It is not from the present state of the Hebrews, that the true 
spirit of their creed and their characteristics as a nation can be 
discovered. They have, indeed, retained all that marks them 
as a distinct peop’e, and preveuts amalgamation with the 
children of the soil, in which they are but sojourners ; but theii 
social and domestic habits are now so completely one with the 
manners and customs of the lands in which they are scattered, 
ill at there is nothing to distinguish them from their Gentile 


310 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


* 


brethren ; and this it is which often causes the false portraits of 
Jewish character, when introduced in tales of the present day 
They think a Jew must be different to his fellows, and so call 
him from the Past, when oppression forced upon him a parti- 
cular character, and place him in the Present, where he looks 
about as much out of place as a mail-clad baron and his rude- 
mannered suite would seem, in the luxurious and refined assem- 
blage of England’s present peers. As a people — as the chosen 
witnesses — the first-born sons of the Most High God, they will 
ever remain a distinct nation over the whole world. They will 
ever be preserved from annihilation — ever be kept from all assi- 
milation with the Gentiles ; even as the river, which is said to 
retain its peculiar taste and coloring in the very lakes through 
which it passes. But the Jews in captivity are not what they 
have been , or what they will be. Even while they remain a dis- 
tinct race, they have unconsciously imbibed many of the charac- 
teristics of the people amongst whom they dwell. The indo- 
mitable pride, the haughty air of superiority, which (not fifty 
years since) characterized the Spanish and Portuguese Jew T 
were of Spain and Portugal, not of Judea; and if we examine 
the condition of the poorest classes of that congregation, and 
compare them with the same ranks in Spain and Portugal, we 
shall find them so exactly similar, that the pride, poverty from 
dislike to labor, indolence and dirt,* are the remnants of their 
assimilation with the manners and customs of the above-named 
countries ; not the characteristics of Judaism, which especially 
commands honest labor and most scrupulous cleanliness. The 
active business habits, and rather a want than a superfluity of 
pride, in the German Jews, mark their assimilation in domestic 
and social habits with the Gentile inhabitants of Germany and 
Holland; the distinction between them and their (so called) 
Spanish and Portuguese brethren, which was very much more 
marked fifty years ago than it is now, originates not at all in 
Judaism, whose beautiful unity ought to banish all such con- 
ventional terms, but simply in the distinction which exists 
between the characteristics of the different countries in which 
they dwelt. Observe the Spaniard and Portuguese, and then 

* Of course there are exceptions. We allude but to some of the very 
lowest of our nation, still unhappily plunged in the ignorance and super- 
stition, the still remaining results of the persecution and slavery of Spain 
ind Portugal. 


PERIOD VII. GERMAN AND SPANISH JEWS. 311 


;ook on the German and the Dutchman ; their characteristics 
are so totally distinct, that it is impossible to mistake them ; 
and the Jewish inmates of these diverse lands naturally shared 
the distinction, even while their holy law w r as the undying link 
which bound them together, and separated them from the reli- 
gion of every other land. Fifty years ago, the Sephardim con- 
gregation* was considered so superior to the Ashkenazim, f as to 
be universally acknowledged as the aristocracy of the nation ; 
but this supposition had nothing to do with Israclitish notions. 
It was, in fact, contrary to the spirit of the Jewish law, which, 
except in the beautiful organization of ranks in the state, looked 
on all Jews as equal, and on the whole nation as the aristocracy 
of the Lord. The modern distinction simply arose from the 
fact, that in Spain and Portugal the Jews had held the highest 
stations in the court and camp and council ; that even after their 
expulsion, they existed apparently as Christians, but in reality 
most faithful Jews, amongst the very nobles and princes in both 
countries ; or as merchants and doctors, not only in medicine, 
but in various branches of learning : and so wealthy as always 
to take their places amongst the aristocracy of the land. Ger- 
many has indeed ennobled a Jew ; and latterly our most learned 
fnen have sprung from German schools. But contemporary with 
the Jewish aristocracy of Spain and Portugal, the Jews in Ger- 
many were so oppressed, and enslaved as never to rise above 
those confining and debasing employments which must ever be 
the consequence of persecution ; and therefore when the two 
parties met on equal ground, the free and blessed soil of 
England, the haughty pride of the Spaniard (not of the Jew , 
for that would have counselled differently) caused that exclusive- 
ness even from his German brother, which formerly had exist- 
ence, but which happily is now fading rapidly into the past. 
England offers a rest and home of perfect freedom to the exile 
and oppressed : and if she welcomes all, will Israel continue 
that mistaken distinction which only circumstances wrought? 
That there is still a difference in the characteristics of German 
and Portuguese, we allow ; and very probably, so constitutional 
is prejudice in favor of one’s own, that neither would change with 
;he other; but the difference and the prejudice are alike foreign 
to Judaism . These are the effects of our dispersion ; of sixteen 


* Spanish and Portuguese. 


T German 


312 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


or seventeen centuries of assimilation with the manners and cus 
toms of Germany and Spain, which unconsciously makes us feel 
so completely as children of the soil, that we forget the national 
unity which our holy religion so imperatively demands, and 
which w'ill be gradually attained ; but it requires time. Enthu- 
siasm may believe it is only to be wished, to be accomplished ; but 
reason tells us, that two centuries in England is not quite sufficient 
to banish the prejudices of ffteen centuries spent in other lands. 
We have neither of us yet become English in feeling; nay, very 
many take pleasure in fostering as a heritage the remnant of 
Spanish feelings, forgetting that such characteristics have nothing 
to do with Judaism ; and till we are really English Jews, the 
distinction wffiich has existed so many centuries will never be 
entirely lost. The Germans will much more easily become Eng- 
lish than the Spanish, simply because the national characteristics 
between England and Germany are less distinct and palpable 
than those between England and Spain. 

In exactly the same manner, the Jews, wherever they are 
scattered, have imbibed prejudices, customs, and even the senti- 
ments which belong — not to their religion, but to the lands of 
their captivity and compelled adoption. The very prejudice, to 
remove which this book has been written — the Jewish degrada- 
tion of woman, her abasement in the social system, as a non- 
partaker of religious responsibility and immortality — if traced to 
its source, will be found to have originated in the blinded notions 
of the Jews of Barbary, and other Eastern countries ; infused 
unconsciously by the contempt for the sex peculiar to the 
Mahomedan inhabitants of those lands. Other prejudices and 
superstitions, supposed by the unobservant to be part of Judaism, 
proceed from exactly the same reason, and have nothing what- 
ever to do with the religion of God. 

The travellers in the Crimea speak of the filth and rapacity, 
and occasional dishonesty of the Jews dwelling in that quarter, 
as the necessary consequence of their blinded religion, quite 
forgetting that they are but the characteristics of the Russian 
and Cossack inhabitants of the same land, and imbibed by the 
Jews as the necessary consequence of such long and close 
association, but utteily repugnant to the spirit of their creed. 

The Polish Jews, again, are different from the German and 
Dutch, much more resembling the Spanish and Portuguese, 
Decause their social position was more like the latter than the 


PERIOD VII. — POLISH JEWS. 


313 


former. Whilst Poland was an independent kingdom, the 
Jews formed the only middle order. Their privileges had 
been secured by Casimir the Great, from the affection felt by 
him towards a beautiful Jewess. They were the corn-merchants, 
Bhop-keepers, inn-keepers, in fact almost every branch of traffic 
sas confined to them ; they formed the principal population of 
towns, and some villages were exclusively peopled by them. 
This social freedom accounts for the dignified bearing and 
generally lofty character of the Polish Jew, at once distinguish- 
ing him from his cowed and oppressed brethren of Germany. 
Sven now Poland is the principal seat of rabbinical authority. 
The religion, from the supremacy of forms and minut6 
ordinances, occasions a greater degree of rigidity and exclusive- 
ness than is the case elsewhere, where the spirit of the Mosaic 
Law is more freely awaking. Since the partition of Poland, 
however, the condition of the Jewish population is as oppressed 
and lowered, as their brethren under the Russian, Prussian, and 
Austrian Governments. But still the Polish Jew, like the 
Spanish and Portuguese, retains the peculiar characteristic of 
his former more elevated position. 

The French and Italian Jews have equally the peculiar cha- 
racteristics of their adopted lands, but they are less marked than 
those of Germany and Spain, the above-named lands not having 
been their residence for such a long continuance. But wherever 
we are scattered, still the truth is evident, that though our law 
and its beautiful forms remain unchangeable, immutable as their 
divine ordinance, our social and domestic customs are modified 
and characterized, according to the manners and customs of the 
lands of our exile. We are still captives of our God, though 
His mercy grants us a social freedom and relief from persecu- 
tion ; and in captivity how might we hope that the spirit of 
our holy law could be permitted to pervade our households ? 
The consequence of transgression was to expel us from our own 
lovely land, to raise a barrier between us and the direct inter- 
ference of the Lord, to scatter us as by a whirlwind over tho 
known world, and there so to degrade us from our high estate, 
from being subject to the Most High God alone, that the guid- 
ing spirit of our homesteads was lost in the darkened barbarism 
of the Gentile world. 

And so it is with the Jew T s of the present day. English 
writers, when they introduce the nation, overlook the Jewish 


314 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


inmate3 of their own land, and delineate either the Spanish, or 
the Qerman, or the Polish, or the Russian Jews ; and as the 
picture they draw is necessarily quite distinct from their own 
manners and customs, they believe themselves, and make others 
believe, that it is a perfect portrait of the Jew, whereas it is in 
fact nothing more nor less than a delineation of the Spaniard, or 
Pole, or German, who might just as correctly be of the Gentile 
as of the Jewish creed.* To draw the Jew correctly then, not 
his present condition, but the annals of the past must provide 
materials. For the spirit and ordinances of his beautiful Jkitb, 
let the word of the Lord be consulted, and the most simple 
mind must understand what and why the Jew believes, and the 
forms that he obeys. Where modern Judaism, so ca'led, differs 
from that standard, it is not the religion which has changed, 
but circumstances which have occasioned the Jew r s unconsciously 
to adopt the feeling's, superstitions, and sentiments, the offspring 
of that darkness which is the atmosphere of persecution, or of 
that prosperity which has infused the sentiments and supersti- 
tions of the Gentiles, with whom they live in reality in close 
association, while in appearance their differing creeds keep them 
widely apart. Let it be remembered, we allude not to the 
religion — that never has, and never will amalgamate — that will 
ever be a thing sacred and apart, will never change, nor modifv, 
nor alter — God hath said it shall last for ever, that its children 
will never cease from being a nation before Him for ever — and 
so it will be. The assimilation in social, domestic, and indivi- 
dual life of the Jew and Gentile, touches not their respective 
creeds. Wherever he is, in whatever land, whatever company, 
whatever position, a Hebrew is known as a Hebrew — and he 
should glory in that distinction ordained by God Himself, to 
keep His people apart — should use his utmost endeavor to pits 
serve that distinction — and neither be ashamed of it himself, nor 

* This extraordinary misconception of their own subject was never 
more clearly marked, than in the works entitled “ Sophia and Emma de 
Lissau, a ficdon of the Jews, of the nineteenth century where, placing 
the scene in England, and in the present era, the author gives an 
imaginary picture of the Polish Jews, at least one or two centuries back, 
and containing not the very smallest resemblance to English Jewish life 
at any time ; in fact, there is nothing to write concerning Anglo-Jewish 
life in the present age. With the sole exception of the ordinances ol 
their creed, their households and families are conducted exactly on tin 
fcj-me principles as English households of the same standing. 


PERIOD VII. POLISH JEWS. 


315 


occasion otners to look down upon him with contempt. He 
can retain all the characteristics of his race and creed, and yet 
in social, domestic, and individual position,- bo one with the 
children of that land which has received the exiles to her foster- 
ing breast, and extended the right hand of fellowship to all. 
Let us be English men and English women, even while we still 
glory in being Hebrews. The union is perfectly compatible, 
and it would tend to our social happiness and the consolidation 
of our national unity. Would it not render us a firmer, nobler 
because a more consolidated mass, if we could forget the dis- 
tinctions of German and Spanish, and Polish and Dutch, and 
only vie with each other to be a noble body of English Jews, 
and mark our pre-eminence in the land where we are Free ? 
Why should there be German and Spanish charities ! Is not 
benevolence open-handed, universal, wide-spreading, scorning 
earthly distinctions, and only seeking whom it can befriend ? Is 
not a Hebrew a Hebrew, in the sight of God and Man — and 
why then should we not be brothers? Why will not the 
German imitate the Spaniard in some things, and the Spaniard 
the German in others, and so forget 'the idle distinctions of our 
captivity, and only strive to become Hebrews as our Bibles 
teach, and Englishmen as a love for our adopted country would 
dictate ? How glorious would be that consolidation, that unity, 
which, the moment a Jew of any land sets foot in England 
there to make his home, would hail him brother, and open to 
him at once our synagogues and our charities, without one 
question as to what congregation he belonged to ! Hebrews and 
Englishmen — we may look round the world, but what prouder 
titles can be our own ! 

This may seem digression ; but, as we proceed, we shall find 
it not so wholly unconnected with our main subject as it may 
appear. Not only are our social and domestic habits infused 
with the manners and customs of the lands of our captivity, but 
our mental and spiritual attainments are in some degree advanced 
or retrograded, according tc the measure of mental and spiritual 
attainments in our Gentile brethren. This is easily explained, 
by comparing our positions in Italy, in Russia, in parts of Ger- 
many, and in the East ; with our position in England, in Ame- 
rica, in France, and in Belgium. 

Italy is still plunged in moral and mental darkness. The 
word of God. revealed only to priests, to whom the consciences 


S10 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


of the multitude are intrusted, is unknown, and, in consequence, 
edicts are still at work against us, as oppressive and degrading 
as in the middle ages. Russia, under a despot-sovereign, and 
unenlightened by the religion of the Protestant, which, from 
considering the Old Testament divine, and permitting its perusal 
by the mass, cannot fail greatly to benefit the Jew, entirely 
prevents, by a precarious and degraded position, all power of 
elevation in its Hebrew subjects ; and on the least, even imagi- 
nary offences, issues edicts against us as horrible as any of less 
enlightened times. * Austria, under Catholic dominion, by a 
most extraordinary contradiction, grants a barony to a Jewish 
family, and yet, if we are to believe contemporary travellers, so 
degrades the Jews as a class, that their condition is little removed 
from most abject slavery. 

In the East, under the superstitious and oppressive sway c 
Mahomedanism, they are still constantly liable to persecution,! 
and cruelty too horrible to relate. And what then is the condi- 
tion of our hapless brethren in these oppressive lands ? Still 
faithful Hebrews indeed, willing to die, or worse, to suffer such 
horrible mental and physical tortures that death were bliss, 
rather than give up one item of their treasured faith ; but the 
mind is cramped, the spirit fettered, the soul cannot spring 
upwards, in that mental and spiritual communing, only to be 
found amongst the free ; and God, more merciful than man, 
demands not what His omniscience know 7 s cannot be given. 
Enough, they are true to Him, they w r orship, they love Him. 
Tno power to spiritualize and enlighten that -worship by rays 
of mind, will be granted when His will removes the yoke, now 
bowfing them to the earth. 

In Germany, the state of the religion seems strangely contra- 
dictory. Our most learned men come from that land. The 
spirit of their faith, in some few quarters, appears awaking, or 
w 7 e could not have such preachers as Gotthold, Solomon, Philip- 
son, Hirsch, and others; and yet how appalling is the 
indifferentism, the rationalism, which seems to compass, as a 
thick mist, the greater portion ! But this is not Judaism ; it has 
its origin, exactly as we have stated, in the spirit of the land 
where the Hebrews are sojourners. What is the real religion 
i*f Germany ? Ask the enlightened Protestant, and he will tej} 


* The late Ukase. 


t The Damascus Cruelties of 1840. 


PERIOD VII. FRENCH JEWS. 


3H 


you ; but too often rank infidelism, indifference, or that religion 
which seeks to do away with revelation, and rest on nature 
(alas for such delusion !) ; and fearful is this association for the 
Jew, just beginning to breathe from the oppressive horrors of 
persecution. Better, far, even occasional oppression, so it will 
but burst the bonds of that deadening stagnation ; better the 
complete and visible distinction of creeds, than that fearful 
indifference to all, which appears to characterize religion in 
Germany. But let not the Gentile seek to burden Judaism 
with the indifference of the Jews in Germany, or the Hebrew 
mav, with equal justice, burden Christianity with the indifference 
and infidelism of Christians in the same land. 

In France, the Jews are free, enlightened, earnest Israelites, 
and faithful citizens ; and yet, if the writer of the review of the 
“ Spirit of Judaism” in the “Archives” of March, 1843, spoke 
the sentiments of all his countrymen, we should fear that 
equality was, in some degree, deadening that national spirit of 
religious exclusiveness which should ever mark the Jew.* We 
should, indeed, feel and act the part of faithful citizens where 
such privileges are allowed us ; but we are not to consider our- 
selves so completely children of the soil as to forget we are 
children of the Lord. That privilege can never belong to the 
history of the past, as the writer seems, in some degree, 
to suppose. We can never be other than a distinct nation — 
His chosen people ; and so, be favored above every nation and 
every religion of the world. Surely we can unite this belief 
with the feelings of a French or English citizen. We do not 
require the sacrifice of the one to fit us for the other ; for 
the mote we felt that, as Hebrews, we were cherished, equalized, 
honored, the more ardent would become our love for the 
land granting us these things, the more earnest our desire 
to serve her and her children, with heart and hand. 

But this absence of perfect nationality, if, indeed, it do exist, 

* The following is the passage in question : — “ Mais Miss Aguilar 
ddpasse peut-etre le but, et dans son zele ardent pour le maintien de 
i’esprit de Judaisme, elle neglige parfois trop l’esprit du siecle. Lea 
Juifs, a ses yeux, forment non seulement une secte a part ; ils formenf 
aussi une nation a part, une nation captive, et dans l’attente de son Mes- 
aiah ou liberateur. . . . La Nationality Juive n'existe plus. Purtout et 
meme dans les contrees ou on leur conteste encore les droit3 de l’homma 
et du citoyen, les Juifs s’efforcent a prouver qu’ils sontde la m6me nation 
yxe ceux, dont ils partagent le sol, et ne sont Juifs que devant Dieu” 


318 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


is attributable, not to imperfection in Judaism, but to intimate 
association with a people whose characteristic is light-hearted 
gaiety, and whose very religion is devoid of the solemnity of form 
and sacredness of restriction peculiar to Protestant lands. The 
French, as a nation, are spirituelle , but not spiritual. The free- 
dom and equality enjoyed by the French Jews, have, to judge 
by their literature, decidedly advanced the latter quality. 
Mind and spirit are both unshackled ; but it is neither unlikely 
nor unnatural, that they should in some degree imbibe the 
light spirit of their Gentile brethren, and so appear to divest 
their faith of a portion of its more solemn and exclusive attri- 
butes, though in reality they are earnest and faithful Israelites 
still. 

But it is in the country of the true , not of the nominal Protes- 
tant, that the Hebrew is at rest, and where his religion will 
attain to greater vitality and strength and spirituality than 
in any other land. The reason for this is obvious ; not only 
because in real Protestant countries persecution of the Jew is a 
thing unheard of, and never has existed from the time it 
gained ascendency, but because the Protestant religion, in 
its morality, its reverence for the Old Testament, its acknow- 
ledgment of the Jews as the chosen people of the Lord, its spirit- 
uality, its abhorrence of all image-worship, comes nearer 
the spirit of the Jewish religion than any other creed ; even 
whilst in its actual doctrines, that of a trinity, a dying Saviour, 
an infinite atonement, and original sin, it is the most widely 
opposed ; but actual creed , absolute doctrines of belief, are 
of far less moment in a multitude, than the spirit of a faith. If 
we present the Athanasian creed to fifty individuals, taken 
from mixed ranks, it is a question whether ten out of the fifty 
will tell you that they believe it as it stands, or whether 
they have not modified it, according to the temperaments 
of individual minds and the reasoning of individual studies ; and 
yet, they would shrink in horror from being considered any- 
thing but earnest Protestants and faithful Christians. Actual 
belief is individual, but the spirit of a faith is universal , 
and, therefore, in relation to the position of the Jews, the latter 
is of infinitely more consequence than the former. When 
we know and perceive that the whole moral and spiritual system 
of the Protestant faith is literally grafted on the moral and 
spiritual (not the ceremonial) revelation vouchsafed to Moses, 


PERIOD VII. JEWS AND PROTESTANTS. 319 

and, as in the latter days, simplified to the meanest understand- 
ing by our elders ; we must feel satisfied that our position must 
be infinitely securer and happier than where the spirit of a 
religion is concealed from the mass, and confined to their 
(so called) spiritual teachers, or in those lands where the moral 
laws are totally distinct from our own. Let me repeat and 
enforce the repetition, that by the spiritual system common 
to the Protestants and Jews, I do not in the very least 
allude to doctrinal points, for in our articles of creed we are 
utterly , entirely , and necessarily opposed ; but simply, to 
the mutual belief of immortality, and that heaven ; s infinitely 
preferable to earth ; to our mutually binding laws, “ Thou shalt 
love the Lord thy God, with all thy soul, and all thy might ; 
and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself to both being 
commanded to practise charity, modesty, humility, brotherly 
love, forgiveness of injuries, unquestioning faith, and child-like 
obedience. It would detain us too long to dilate on all 
the points on which we agree ; points, it would be well for 
both parties to ponder on more frequently, but which too often 
become invisible, from the too often haughty arrogance of 
the Christian, refusing to us the very privileges, spiritual 
and moral, which he has derived from us alone ; and from 
the more charitable, but equally mistaken, seeking our conver- 
sion, as the only means of our salvation, and of our attaining a 
true knowledge of God, when, from us, and us alone, their 
knowdedge of the Eternal and their hopes of heaven are 
derived. 

But while, from the spirit pervading Protestant laws (a spirit 
springing from the simple, but important fact that the Bible, 
the whole Bible, is open to rich and poor, prince and peasant, 
man, woman, and child), our social position is secure, and we 
assimilate more closely to our Gentile brother ; let it not bo 
forgotten that our spiritual position is begirt with more danger 
than when the differences, between our holy religion and 
that of other nations were more strongly marked. Would 
we be Israelites indeed we must study the doctrines and 
adhere to the forms, as well as be infused with the spirit 
of our faith. We must learn in what we differ so widely from 
our Gentile brother that, while we acknowledge the same moral 
law, and experience the same spiritual aspirations, there should 
be such an impassable barrier between us that we must ever keep 


320 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


apart, guarded as by invulnerable mail, from the constant 
attempts to lure us from our creed. The more closely we 
examine and study our own faith, and in riper years the more 
we look into the religion of other creeds, the more clearly shall 
we understand the vital points of difference, and the very many 
of agreement, and we shall rise from such study with love tenfold 
increased towards our own faith, and charity redoubled towards 
our Gentile brethren. 

If, then, as all will agree, the cause of the superior enlighten 
nient, freedom, morality, and charity of Protestant lands, origin- 
ates in the fact of their possessing, and believing, and preaching 
the spirit of the whole bible — ours as well as theirs, it is clearly 
evident win the Hebrew in such lands can become more spirit- 
ual, more earnest, and more exalted, mentally and individually. 
In the first place he is free ! and the mind an l spirit, released 
from the shackles of darkness and persecution, can once more 
resume the native dignity, and mental superiority, and spiritual 
aspirations peculiar to his race and creed, and which, through 
long ages of oppression, were invisible indeed, but never lost. 
In the next he mingles with a people, free, enlightened, spiritual, 
moral, benevolent, become so from the spirit of the same moral 
law as guides himself; and the atmosphere, congenial to his 
native tastes and native feelings, inspires him with a spirit of 
nationality and elevation which circumstances have long denied 
him, but to which he returns with zest and earnestness, glad to 
burst from the stagnating indifference which is the unavoidable 
successor of brutalizing persecution. 

If, then, as we have endeavored to show, the social and 
domestic habits, nay, the very character of the Hebrews must, 
during their captivity, in some degree be modified, altered, 
infused, according to the manners, customs, and characteristics 
of the nations in which we are captives, even while our faith and 
its holy ordinances still mark us a people apart, a distinct and 
never assimilating nation ; it is forcibly evident that the Israel- 
ites in England have greater advantages, and more, therefore, is 
demanded from them than in any other land (America, perhaps, 
alone excepted). Of America, as a nation, we know not enough 
to attempt discussion on her domestic character and habits, and 
how such may improve the character of her adopted children. 
The Hebrew advantages in that land, more numerous even than 
in England, consist in perfect freedom ; so that neither evil, 


PERIOD VII. ENGLISH JEWS. 


321 


military, nor naval disabilities, interfere with his elevation in any 
art, science, or profession to which his talents point ; thus neithe* 
persecution nor interference can prevent his guiding, not only jiis 
public adherence to his religion, but the sanctity of his house, 
according to the domestic, as well as social and ceremonial laws 
of Moses ; and he is free to become mentally and spiritually 
elevated, and to raise the name of Israelite by deed as well as 
faith — these are his advantages in America : and fearful is his 
responsibility if he passes them by unused. 

But on the character of the English there is no darkness in 
our mind — integrity — honor — solidity — reserve, which only 
renders his friendship, when given, more worthy — a lofty spirit 
of independence and consciousness of his own position, as distinct 
from the radical contemner of differing ranks as respect from 
servility — benevolence — domestic virtue which, in either man or 
woman, must make home happy — intellect and genius, which 
can only breathe in freedom — such are the characteristics of the 
English ; and if they fail in the sparkling vivacity and apparent 
warmth of the French, the artistic genius and strong passions 
of the Italians, the music and metaphysics of the Germans, 
surely they have qualities sufficient of their own, to make us 
truly love the land, and thank God that He has granted his 
captives so secure and blessed a rest. Nobly, then, in England 
may Judaism make manifest her spiritual, her elevating influ- 
ence on the characters of her children ; for the manners and 
customs of her Gentile brethren in this blessed land, instead of 
infusing characteristics foreign to the Jew, will but forward his 
advance in the scale of being, recall every minor moral law, 
which oppression had banished, and encourage every elevating, 
humanizing, and intellectual power, which, in the eras of perse- 
cution and darkness, seemed to have departed. The son of 
Israel may now cultivate the intellect and genius natural to his 
distinguished race. He can now prove, that if ever he were 
debased, it was not his religion, but the slavery of oppression 
which was at fault ; if ever spirituality seemed to have departed, 
torture had banished it from his heart — but that once free — it 
was the life, the breath, the glory of his faith ; that without it 
Judaism was not Judaism, but a lifeless worship, only rendered 
acceptable by obedience in the midst of woe. And what may 
not the Women of Israel become in this thrice blessed land ? 


322 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


Much, jLu.'ii to recall what they have been, and to shadow forlt 
what they will be ! 

At length we have reached the point at which, throughout 
this concluding period, we have aimed, and towards which all 
our remarks have tended. In every other country but England 
and America, slid lingering restrictions, or characteristics pecu- 
liar to the children oi the soil, may prevent or retard the spirit- 
ual and domestic graces which are the woman of Israel’s own 
— and of which, however deadened by circumstances, nothing 
can deprive her; but in England and America these can be 
cultivated, fostered, and so displayed, as to mark to the whole 
Gentile world, our national privileges, our sacred duties, and our 
immortal hope. We have seen fiom the very commencing of 
our creation, the natural position of the granted gifts, and 
inherited failings of our sex. We have looked with an unshrink- 
ing gaze on every mention of woman in the word of our God, 
from the mother of the whole human race, and the ancestresses 
of Israel; to the females under the law, and the beautiful captive, 
by whom a nation was preserved from death ; we have gone 
still further, from the records of Josephus, to draw forth every 
mention of our noble ancestors, that we might learn their 
domestic and social position at a rime when inspired historians 
were silent ; we have scanned every statute, every law, alike in 
the words of Moses, and in their simplifying commentary by our 
elders ; and the result of such examination has been, we trust, 
to convince every woman of Israel of her immortal destiny, her 
solemn responsibility, and her elevated position, alike by the 
command of God, and the willing acquiescence of her brother 
man. That if any laws derogatory and contradictory to the 
station assigned her before God and man, by the merciful provi- 
dence of our Father in Heaven, have sullied our homesteads, 
they come from the darkened ages of barbarism and persecu- 
tion, the spirit of which naturally infused the minds of the 
captives, as well as of the captors — and have neither authority 
nor weight. They have, indeed, ever been but words ; for if 
w r e scan the Jewish households in every age, we shall find the 
mothers, and wives, and daughters of Israel, treated with such 
unfailing respect, tenderness, and consideration, as would shame 
the homes of many a Gentile land. We can find not the very 
faintest evidence of debasing or restricting laws : and once con 


PERIOD VII. EFFECTS OB FREEDOM. 323 


rinced, as surely we must be, that in the sight of God the 
women of Israel are cherished, loved, provided for, as He provided 
for none other ; and in the sight of man, are elevated, respected, 
and fostered in every relation of life; must we not think 
earnestly and deeply how best to make manifest our own con- 
viction of our spiritual, social, and domestic responsibilities ; 
and by our superiority in holiness, and in every virtue that 
makes home happy, and our sex beloved, prove, far more 
forcibly than the most eloquent words, the utter falsity of 
the charge against us, and that Judaism indeed gives us ail 
we need. 

According to our ancient fathers, whose opinion is evidently 
founded on our holy law, the mission of the women of Israel is 
education : and this, even as in olden times, we can still accom- 
plish. We have written so much on this all-important point in 
our notice of Jochebed, and again in the “Martyr Mother,” 
that little is needed in addition now : but earnestly we would 
entreat our sisters in Israel to compare their lot with that of 
those hapless wives and mothers, who, in the middle ages, con- 
tinually beheld their sons and daughters snatched from them 
and forcibly baptized, or murdered before their very eyes ; and, 
somewhat later, were compelled to send them to convents and 
monastic schools for education, implanting, as they could, the 
religion of their fathers. At the time of their expulsion from 
Spain, and when reaching the town of Fez, they hoped their 
sufferings were coming to a close, a pirate lured 150 youths on 
board his ship, and in the very sight of the distracted parents 
set sail, and sold them as slaves in some distant port. In Por- 
tugal the youth were baptized by force, and drafted off to the 
unwholesome island of St. Thomas ; and in the reign of 
Emanuel, son-in law of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Jews were 
not only ordered to quit the kingdom generally by a certain 
day ; but a secret edict issued that all the children under four- 
teen years of age should be torn from the arms of their parents, 
and dispersed through the kingdom to be baptized and brought 
up as Christians. The awful secret transpired, and lest it should 
be frustrated was instantly put into execution. What woman 
of Israel, be she mother, sister, or childless wife, can imagine 
the terror of this awful edict — can portray in her fancy, not 
only the hapless children torn from their mothers by brutal 
•avages, but their mothers themselves,, rendered desperate by 


324 


THE WOMEN CF ISRAEL. 


tbe agonizing alternative, throwing their offspring into welh 
and rivers, destroying them with ^heir own hands, and yet not 
feel her whole being quiver with the burst of thanksgiving, that 
in some lands these awful days are past. Ever and anon, 
indeed, comes even now the low groan of Jewish suffering from 
distant shores. Damascus, Russia, Mogadore, within the last 
seven years, have vied with the oppressive cruelties of long-past 
days ; cruelties at which every mother’s heart must quake, and 
which bid every woman of Israel cling closer and closer yet to 
those nobler lands that give her a peaceful home, and so 
grant the sweet charities of life, and the affections, vitality and 

joy- 

Even wnere the tempest-clouds of persecution have passed 
away, the spiritual atmosphere for the Jewish captives is dead- 
ened and stagnated by restricting clauses, which, directly con- 
tradictory to the spirit of Judaism, must have originated in 
former oppressive decrees, although, as the decrees themselves 
have been removed (though not their consequences), the reli- 
gion is falsely supposed itself to be the cause. In some parts 
of Germany, for instance, young unmarried females are forbid- 
den to worship in the synagogues — it being considered indeco- 
rous to make their appearance there, unless engaged or wedded. 
There may be other customs equally enslaving; but we are 
cautious in repeating any but those we know to be true. We 
see they are the remnants of oppression, not the ordinances of 
the religion, by the simple fact, that where we are free, the 
women of Israel take, unquestioned, the place, both in the syna- 
gogue and in the household, assigned them by our law. 

When, therefore, we reflect on these things, and then on the 
spirit awakening in England, America, the Colonies, France, and 
no doubt in many parts of other lands (though working secretly 
and almost unconsciously, as all improvements do at first, we 
see it not so broadly flashing as in the above-named lands) ; 
shall we not as a body do all we can to forward and confirm 
the advantages proffered ? Fifty years ago, from the still lin- 
gering dread of exposing our peculiar tenets to members of 
other creeds, Judaism, though faithfully followed, and all its 
ordinances obeyed, never found voice in our households, much 
less in more public places of worship ; we dared not speak or 
write of it, lest unwittingly we should offend, and so be exposed 
again to the horrors of persecution. Was it marvel, then, that 


PE RIG D VII. EFFECTS OF FREEDOM. 323 


wo were Jews only because our fathers were, and tliai the vital 
spirit of piety seemed dead within us? Judging from us at 
that time, we do not wonder that some more enlightened of the 
Gentiles should pronounce the Jewish religion to be void of all 
spirituality, and so a lifeless worship. They could know nothing 
of us but what they saw ; and they were not likely to look so 
deep as to behold the origin of this stagnation, in the stupifying 
terror and ever present dread of oppressive persecution. But 
now, if we do not labor heart and soul to make manifest that 
our religion is the most spiritual, the most life-breathing, com- 
fort-giving religion of any over the known world, the fault is 
with us, and us alone. We need no longer be Jews because 
our fathers were. In the synagogue our religion is taught ; in 
our households the Bible is our companion ; our daughters as 
well as our sons are instructed as our Great Lawgiver himself 
commanded. 

In France, in some parts of Germany, in some of the Colonies, 
and in one synagogue of England, girls, as well as boys, are 
examined in their faith, and admitted to the beautiful rite of 
confirmation ; and this we foresee will gradually extend over all 
our congregations. The Hebrew language is now taught, studied, 
known, as any other modern tongue. The time may, nay it 
will come, though it seems a wild dream now, when it shall 
again be the language of the Israelites, not alone wherein to 
pray, but to converse, and write, as the vernacular idiom of the 
lands in which we are sojourners. Our girls, equally with our 
boys, are attaining real grammatical knowledge of this most 
glorious language, and in their youth are thus imbibing treasures, 
which, when in their turn they become mothers, will be imparted 
to their children, and so mark them from their earliest infancy, 
Hebrews, as well as English, French, or German. To our 
daughters, as to our sons, the Bible is unsealed ; and its 
explanation is fearlessly given by many a Jewish preacher. 
Books of Jewish sacred literature are rising in the vernacular of 
the many lands of our captivity ; and the time is gone by when 
man might fear tc call himself a Jew. In the countries so often 
quoted, the more a Hebrew respects his creed, the more he is 
respected ; the more spiritually enlightened he is in the doctrines, 
the ordinances, the commands of his own religion, the more 
will he find himself appreciated and valued by the spiritual- 
aiinded of even opposing creeds ; and the more universal will he 


526 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


his brotherly love, for the less 1 dangerous will be social inter 
course. 

Will not then the women of Israel do all they can to prove 
how deeply and earnestly they feel these things? They are 
free now not only to believe and obey, but to study and speak 
of their glorious faith. To look themselves within their Bibles, 
and read there the foundation for all which we have sought 
humbly, yet most heartfully, to bring before them. To find in 
that ceaseless fountain of living waters, not alone their privileges 
as women of Israel, but all of strength, comfort, peace, immortal 
hope, and earthly guidance, which as weak, frail women, they 
so imperatively need. Will they not then come there, and 
beholding not only their responsibilities and their duties, but, 
in the prophets, their sins in the Past and their destiny in the 
Future, do all they can to break from the one and forward the 
other? To cultivate with heart, soul, and might, all those 
spiritual, mental, and accomplished graces which should be every 
woman’s, and yet more strikingly every woman’s who calls 
herself of Israel ? 

In very many lands of their captivity, it is fully in their power 
so to do, even if it were possible, yet more so than men ; for 
the ordinances and commands of our holy faith interfere much 
less with woman’s retired path of domestic pursuits and pleasures, 
than with the more public and more ambitious career of man. 
Her duty is to make home happy ; her mission, to influence 
man, alike in /he relative duties of mother to her son, wife to 
her husband, sister to her brother, and, in her own person, to 
upraise the holy cause of a religion, which, from its pure spirit- 
uality and long concealment, is by the multitude misunderstood, 
vilified, and charged with such false accusations that only acts 
can remove. Something more is needed for the elevation of 
our faith, than even making it known through books (though 
that may accomplish much). We must prove the superiority 
of our guiding law, by the superiority of our own conduct, as 
women of Israel, in our own houses. 

To obtain this superiority is to become more spiritual ; for 
in that single word every feminine, grace and Jewish requisite is 
comprised. Let a woman truly and sincerely love her God— 
feel that his image is in her heart — that she can bring Him so 
close to her that her every thought, her every aspiration, her 
every joy, as well as every prayer and sorrow, can be traced uu 


PERIOD VII. SPIRITUAL! TV. 


321 


lo Him, and we need not fear that she will ever fail in hei 
duties, either to Him or to man, in his service or in her home. 
Once this spiritual love obtained, and a halo is thrown over her 
whole life, be it one of sorrow or of jo} T . His Law becomes 
part of her very being ; she could not disobey it, without dis- 
obeying the gracious Father and Lord whom she loves better 
than herself. She will love all mankind, think evil of none 
(without mighty cause), for they are His children, created in 
His image. She will love the ties of home, her parents, hus- 
band, children, brother, and sisters, with intensest and most 
endearing love — for He has granted them, and filled her glow- 
ing heart with the sweet emotions which to love in Him creates. 
She will regard death for herself as yet more happy than life, 
for then she will be with her God and her beloved ones for 
evermore, undisturbed by sin or doubt, or fear or woe ; and for 
those she loves, with human suffering indeed — for such we are 
permitted and encouraged to feel — but still with the firm con- 
viction that for them all must be joy, for they are with God, 
and in spirit with her still. She will think less of the Grave 
on Earth than of the Soul in Heaven. She will feel indeed 
the blank within her home, but she will realize in her heart of 
hearts the blessed conviction that if Earth has one less, Heaver 
has one more, and becomes with each that departs, a dearer, 
more longed-for home. She will look on the meanest flower, 
the humblest bird, even as on the loftiest things of nature, with 
that peculiar feeling which the poet describes in those exquisite 
line' 5 J 

“ Thanks to the human heart by which we live. 

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears. 

To me, th< meanest flower which blows, can bring 
Thoughts tnat do often lie too deep for tears 

because she feels them the work of her Father in heaven, cre- 
ated as much for her individual joy and thanksgiving, as for the 
multitudes, who in the Past and the Present and Future have 
gazed, and will still gaze upon the same. 

This is to be spiritual ; this is to be an Israelite ; this is to be 
woman - . We are quite aware that many of our English read- 
ers will exclaim, “ Why this is to be Christian !” and refuse to 
believe that such emotions can have existence in a Jewish heart 

* Wordswortn. 


* 


328 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL 


While our Jewish readers will, in consequence, refuse to seek it* 
attainment, because if it resemble Christianity it cannot be 
Jewish ; both parties choosing to forget that the spirit of their 
widely different creeds has exactly the same origin, the word of 
God : whence all of Christianity, save its doctrine of belief, 
originally came. 

Let those who deny spirituality to Israel, and declare that it 
is only from association with the Christian, and reading Chris- 
tian books, that we think of spirituality at all — read the moral- 
ity of the Talmud, even if they can only procure those extracts 
in the Hebrew Review ; and unless resolved to retain their 
opinion in the very face of conviction, they must acknowledge 
that from us all their spirituality came, and that if we are re- 
awaking to its sublime call, it is not from association with them, 
but from peace and freedom permitting us once more to honor 
the Lord as our God, and giving us those extracts from our 
venerable teachers which show us in what light they regard the 
ordinances of the Lord. We will quote one passage, even at 
the risk of being thought tedious, merely to prove our assertion, 
that spirituality was the very breath of our religion ; and how, 
in fact, could it be otherwise, when it came direct from the reve- 
lation of the Lord ? 

“Man is to impress his mind, that whatever he does , is to be 
with the intention to glorify his Creator . His rising, his walk- 
ing, his speech, and all his occupations are to have that aim. 
When eating, drinking, indulging in affection, his purpose is not 
to be the mere gratification of his desires. His food is merely 
to be wholesome and nourishing, far removed from luxury. In 
love he is to recollect its end and aim. Even when he lies 
down to sleep, it is to be with the intention to arise cheerful 
and refreshed for the service of his Creator, and thus, even the 
act of sleep will be an act of worship to his Creator, fo • our 
rabbies say, Let the aim of all thou undertakest be the glory 
of the Deity . And thus Solomon says, In all thy ways acknow- 
ledge Him , and He shall direct thy paths.”* Again, we are 
commanded to associate with the pious and wise, in order to 
.earn their ways ; as it is said in the Law, ye shall attach your- 
selves to Him, you shall attach yourself to everything that leads 
to Him , sanctity and perfection. And again, after most minute 

• Selected from Morality of ihe Talmud. Hebrew Review, pago 23 


PERIOD VII. SPIRITUALITY. 329 

directions, as to the forgiveness of injuries, and banishment of 
inward resentment, even to its being sinful for man, when he 
does a kind action to an injured, to say, 4 Take it, I will not do 
to thee as thou didst to me,’ for it is transgressing the com- 
mand, ‘Thou shalt not resent,’ it continues, l a man is entirely 
to dismiss every feeling of ill-ioill from his heart and mind , as 
the law not only extends to the actual deed , but likewise to the 
inward sentiments, and, therefore , the mind must be pure, so that 
the actions must flow from a worthy source .’ ”* 

With such writings our own, and ours from centuries long past, 
do we need the works of Christian divines to make Israel spirit- 
ual ? Oh, shame ! shame on those sons of Israel, who, from 
pure ignorance, deny spirituality to their beautiful creed, and 
report that we are not a spiritual people ! If we have not been, 
oppressive slavery is the cause. If we are not now, in those 
nations where we are free, the heart shudders at the sin we are 
incurring: and, oh ! fearful is it if the Women of Israel. neglect 
the opportunities now their own, and refuse to become the pure 
spiritual beings, which not only their religion but their sex so 
imperatively demands. We fear that with all our efforts to 
explain our meaning, we shall still by several not be under- 
stood ; for spirituality is so exquisite and refined, so subtle an 
essence, that to describe, or explain, or teach it, is impossible. 
It can only be infused by the earnest desire to possess it, and 
by the grace of God. It is so peculiarly woman’s attribute, that 
without it her loveliest charms, her highest intellect, feels imper- 
fect. ' By man it is unattainable to the same extent — unattain- 
able, in fact, at all, unless infused by the influence of woman — 
and therefore do we so earnestly beseech our sisters in Israel to 
invite, cultivate, cherish it, till it so becomes a part of themselves 
that it pervades their every word, thought, and private deed, 
the domestic worship of act and love , and the public service of 
prayer and praise, and thus it be infused into their sons with 
the very nourishment they give, the caresses of their infancy, 
the education of their boyhood. Then, indeed, might man 
become spiritual, and in all things fitted for the first-born of the 
Lord. 

To explain our meaning as to this spiritual essence, which 
should be indivisible from the woman of Israel, we will refer our 


• Morality of the Talmud. Hebrew Review, pp. 59 and 62. 


330 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


young readers to some probably favorite authors. Every 
single line written by Mrs. S. C. Hall, whether it be a story for 
a little child or a three volume novel, a tale for Chambers’s 
Journal or a sketch of Irish character, is so essentially spiritual, 
that without a single syllable unduly introduced of religion, wo 
know it must be the religion of God’s word, which is the main- 
spring of her being. Mrs. Hemans, Mrs. Howitt, Mrs. Southey 
(Caroline Bowles), Joanna Bailie, are all of the same beautiful 
class. On the other hand, Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austin, 
two first-rate female writers, are moral , not spiritual , in their 
works. Among male writers — Howitt, Wilson (whether in 
prose or verse), James Montgomery, Wordsworth, are spiritual 
writers; Scott, Campbell, Rogers, and many others, are not, 
and yet their writings are as moral and pure as their more 
spiritualized brethren’s. We are not alluding tc either class of 
writers as elevating one above the other, but simply to endeavor 
by such reference to make our own feeling of spirituality more 
clearly understood. 

If, then, spirituality is so essentially the vital breath of the 
Jewish religion and of woman’s loveliest nature, will not every 
woman of Israel seek and strive and pray to make it her own, 
now that freedom and peace are hers ; and her home, though it 
be but of the exile, is not exposed to the awful trials of the Past, 
and of the Present in very many lands ? If she looks into the 
records of her ancestors — if she remembers Leah, Deborah, 
Naomi, Hannah, Abigail, the Shunammite, Huldah, and Esther 
— must she nof. feel that spirituality was the natural attribute 
of the Women of Israel 4n the past ? and if she carefully studies 
the prophets, she will find that such will be their attribute in 
future ; and there she will read, that until it is attained by 
man as well as woman, Israel must remain exiled and captive, 
far from Jerusalem, and from Jerusalem’s God. 

We have heard that censures have been passed upon our 
work, professing to illustrate the future destiny, as well as past 
history and present duties of the Hebrew females, as a presump- 
tuous allusion to what we can know nothing about. Now, with 
all due deference to such critiques, we would say, that unless we 
disbelieve the prophets, our Future Destiny is quite as clearly 
traced out as her own past history. To quote all the eloquent 
passages, prophesying not only our restoration to Jerusalem, but 
the circumcision of the heart, and awakening of that spiritual 


PERIOD VII. FUTURE DESTINY. 


331 


religion which will unite us, even on earth, with God, would be 
useless here. We can only refer our readers to the prophets 
themselves, and as briefly as may be, condense and indite what 
appears to us to be their meaning. 

When restored to Jerusalem sin will be purified from the 
human heart ; all of stagnation, of hardness, of unbelief, will 
have vanished ; we shall not have to struggle with those imper- 
fections and failings which come between the heart and its God, 
and deaden all spiritual worship. We shall all know Him then, 
from the smallest to the greatest of us ; there will be no occa- 
sion to say to one another, “ know ye the Lord.” Our burnt- 
olFerings and sacrifices will be again acceptable ; the temple of the 
Lord will be re-established on his holy mountain ; and not only 
will it be sought by the remnant of Israel, gathered from the 
North and from the South, and from the East and from the 
West, but strangers will join themselves to Israel, and all 
nations will flow unto it, and never more walk in the imagina- 
tion of their own hearts. The Ten Tribes will be discovered, 
and Israel and Judah once again made one. Disease and 
suffering will pass away ; even death itself be swallowed up for 
ever. Our nobles shall be of ourselves, our governors spring 
from the midst of us, and the Lord himself God over all the 
families of Israel. Pastors and shepherds will be granted us 
according to the spirit of the Lord, and they will fill us with 
knowledge and understanding. Not only will the law and its 
everlasting ordinances be restored ; but it will so be written in 
our hearts, that we shall never more disobey or fail in its 
spiritual observance. There will be no more vain yearnings in 
the soul, seeking to spring from its earthly prison to obtain 
more earnest communion with its God ; for every soul will be 
satisfied with His goodness ; the heavy and the sorrowful will, 
be so filled with His love, that weariness and sorrow will alike 
flee away, and be but names belonging to the Past. And this 
spiritual restoration will not be distinct from a return to Jewish 
ordinances and Jewish ceremonies, as our opponents believe. I 
know not how any reasoning and believing mind, be his creed 
what it may, can "peruse the prophet Ezekiel, from the fortieth 
chapter to the end, without being almost startled at its close 
resemblance to the Hebrew religion ordained by God through 
His servant Moses. More extended, indeed, alike in the size of 
the Temple and the Holy Land, as must be , for the reception 


332 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 

• 

of the multitude, not only of Israel, but of the nations who will 
universally flow thither, till the earth overflows with righteous- 
ness. But however extended, we must perceive that the 
prophet divides the land once more into the inheritance of the 
twelve tribes ; that the gates of the Holy City all bear the 
names of Jacob’s sons. The heritage of the sons of Levi is 
again to have the service of the Lord. The altars, and courts, 
and fountains, are all prepared for the restoration of the holy 
sacrifices and offerings, which, in our captivity, God ordained to 
cease ; nay, the very number and species of animals for the 
offerings are named, the feasts and fasts referred to ; and how, 
then, can our opponents attempt to persuade us that the sacri- 
fices, and offerings, and festivals, are all but types of another 
dispensation, and done away with now for ever ? What, then, is 
the meaning of this sublime prophecy, if the religion of the 
Lord revealed by Moses, ceremonial as well as spiritual and 
moral, is never to be restored ? The merit of sacrifices and 
offerings consisted, not in themselves, but in obedience, and 
that obedience, in our restoration, will again be tried, and never 
more found to fail, for God himself has promised to remove the 
stony heart from our breasts, and replace it with the heart of 
flesh, on which love for Him and His ordinances will be 
impressed for everlasting. 

Faint and feeble is this attempt to portray the destiny 
awaiting Israel in his own bright land, and earnestly, entreat- 
ingly, we beseech our readers to turn to the prophecies them- 
selves, and tracing it there, remember that every consoling 
promise, every spiritual joy, every forgiveness of sin is promised 
to all Israel , woman as well as man. Who that believes in 
the prophecies can continue to say that the future destiny of the 
Hebrew females is a subject unknown, and that therefore it is 
presumptuous to allude to it ? To be restored to our own land, 
and to the religion of God as Moses taught it, undimmed, 
untarnished by a single breath of man — to love the Lord indeed, 
with heart, and soul, and might, and our neighbor as ourselves 
— to feel no shade, no doubt creep over our minds, and deaden 
all of spiritual joy — no human imperfections steal between loving 
hearts, and bid discord reign where God ordained all peace — to 
feel no weariness, no sadness, but every yearning filled — to be 
exposed no more to war, be it of sword or word — to become 
r.isters, wives, mothers, of men who, as the first-born cf the Lord* 


PERIOD VII. FUTURE DESTINT. 333 


m whatever social rank they occupy, be it prince or peasant, 
noble or servant, priest or herdsman, will yet, in the sight of 
all the nation, uphold and show forth the glory, and the majesty, 
and the mercy of the Lord. This is our future destiny — this 
the goal to which, as women of Israel, we must press forward, 
heart and soul : for no little towards its eventual attainment 
depends on us, weak, frail, insignificant in seeming as we are. 

It is, we believe, the supposition of some that, as God haa 
ordained these things, nothing depends on man ; we have only 
to wait His time. A long and careful study of his word will, 
however, convince that merely to wait is not enough : our own 
exertions, our own ceaseless prayers, must hasten the day of our 
restoration, or still it will be postponed. We must return to the 
Lord in our captivity, or how will He hear us ? “ If they shall 

confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers, with their 
trespass which they have trespassed against me, and that also 
they have walked contrary to me ; and that I also have walked 
contrary unto them, and have brought them into the land of 
their enemies : if then their uncircumcised heart be hurnoled, 
and they then accept of the punishment of their iniquity, then 
will I remember my covenant with Jacob, and also my covenant 
with Isaac; and also my covenant with Abraham will I 
remember; and I will also remember their land.”* And that 
covenant was, that as the stars of heaven and the sand of the 
sea-shore so should be his seed, and in that seed all the nations 
of the earth should be blessed, whilst before the Lord it was a 
nation for everlasting, and he would be their god. And again, 
still more forcibly — “And it shall come to pass when all these 
things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse which I 
have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind amongst 
all the nations whither the Lord thy God hath driven thee, and 
shalt return unto the Lord thy God, and shalt obey his voice 
according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy 
children, with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that then 
the Lord thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion 
on thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations 
whither the Lord thy God hath scattered thee ; and the Lord 
thy God will circumcise thy heart and the heart of thy seed, to 
love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy 
mil, THAT THOU MAYST LIVE.^f 

♦Levit. xi'i 40-42. 


r Deut. xxx. 1-6. 


S34 


THE WOMEN OF ISRAEL. 


With these eloquent words of Moses before us, confirmed as 
they are throughout every prophet, can we doubt a single 
moment that the Eternal waits to return unto us till we return 
unto him, to release us from captivity, till we acknowledge its 
justice by deploring, confessing, and conquering our sins ? We 
must know and feel it relates to us now , and not to our first 
captivity ; for then Babylon alone was the scene of our exile, 
and now it is over all the nations that we are scattered. And 
what is the first gracious promise proffered to win us to return ? 
“ That our stony hearts shall be circumcised, that we may love the 
Lord our God with all our heart and soul , so that we may live , not 
only on earth, but in heaven for such is the true meaning of 
Moses’s words ; and will not this prove to us that to love God 
stands first of every duty, and hallows every form which, without 
such love, is mere mockery to Him, and lifelessness to us ? And 
to love God thus is to attain that spirituality which we so ear- 
nestly conjure every woman of Israel to seek ; for unless she 
attains it there is little hope for man, and without it, oh! when will 
Israel be restored — when will our captivity be at an end ! We 
appeal not to our sisters in Israel merely as women , though that 
is in itself sufficient need for the comfort, the blessedness, of a 
spiritual worship, but as under God, the influences of man. 
Compare the boy whose tender years have been passed with a 
spiritual, a gentle mother, to him who from his earliest infancy 
has been thrown on the rude influences of man’s guidance in a 
public school : follow these boys to manhood, and there will be 
little doubt who will most maintain the spiritual, as well as the 
ceremonial worship of his fathers, or tend most to uphold the 
glory of his God. Oh ! as we w T ould hasten our glorious destiny, 
let us ponder well our own responsibilities, and becoming morG 
spiritual ourselves, infuse the same immortal essence into man ! 
If we do this, shall we say we have done nothing ? shall we not 
uphold the dignity, the beauty, the holiness of our privileges as 
women of Israel if we so infuse, so guide, as mothers, that man, 
uplifted from his grosser self, so unites the spiritual with the 
worldly, the love of God with the dreams of earth, that without 
neglecting or despising a single earthly duty or human feeling, 
he forwards the glorious cause of God, and in the sight of tne 
whole Gentile world stands forth an Israelite indeed ? And not 
as mothers only may we do this ', let but the woman of Israel 
cast aside the frivolous occupations, the oetty ailings, the love 


PERIOD VII. FUTURE DESTINY. 


330 


of mere pleasure which are sometimes the characteristics of her 
sex, and remembering she is a woman of Israel, a daughter of 
the Lord, cultivate and love the higher and nobler attributes of 
heart and spirit ; let her prove by the whole aspect of her life, 
be she young or old, married or single, the cherished member 
of a family or lonely upon earth, yet let her prove that she is 
spiritual, alike in the cloudless happiness, the elastic enjoyments 
of the young girl, and in the quieter pleasures of the matron, 
the peaceful calm of the more aged ; that there is a deeper 
source than meets the eye ; that all man sees and feels so lov- 
able is formed from that close communion with her God called 
spirituality ; and without one serious word, without one reference 
to the subject blended with her being, yet will woman influence 
man, and, raising her in his estimation, bid him reverence whilst 
he loves, and so gradually become infused with the same lofti- 
ness of thought and holiness of deed inseparable from spiritualized 
woman. His superior reason, his mightier power, his cooler and 
more penetrating judgment will dictate the just medium how to 
make these noble qualities, imbibed from woman, most useful to 
his fellows, most serviceable in the cause of God ; but not the less 
will he love and value that weaker sex from whom they are 
derived. 

To the women of Israel, then, is intrusted the noble privilege 
of hastening “ the great and glorious day of the Lord,” by the 
instruction they bestow upon their sons, and the spiritual ele- 
vation to which they may attain in social intercourse, and yet 
more in domestic life. Oh ! that we might hope that we have 
not entirely worked in vain ! but that becoming, through these 
lowlj pages, more sensible of their privileges as W^men of 
Israel — feeling that for them, and them alone, the Most High 
God deigned Himself to provide a law and take them in their 
weakness, their liability to suffering and oppression, under his 
own especial care — that instead of degrading and enslaving, the 
Mosaic religion, as Moses taught, and as the elders commented 
upon, and the people practised, cared for woman as none other 
did, or others, too, would have produced their prophetesses : 
that to them is intrusted the regeneration of Israel; from their 
instructions, their influence, there must arise men spiritualized 
and gifted for the service of Israel and his God — women, fit 
helpmates for such men — that on them, in their homes and in 
their world depends the manifestation of that spiritual, mental, 
26 


33C the women of Israel 

and lofty superiority which their whole history marks their own — 
that they must prove the falsity of those charges hinted by the 
ignorant against their religion and themselves ; that, feeling to 
their heart’s core these things, they would break from the long 
years of slavery and woe, unshackle the spirit from the heavy 
chains of indifference which a cessation from oppression origin- 
ally wove — burst from the prejudices of darkened years, and 
stand forth in the face of their nation and the whole world, the 
ministering spirits of love, and thoughtfulness, and worth, com- 
panions of man’s intellect and need ; yet seeking not, dreaming 
not to vie with him ; beautifiers of home, spiritualizers of earth, 
even as at their creation, and in the revelation of His law, the 
God of Israel ordained ! And if we can attain to this, shall we 
fail ? Oh ! let us press forward in this glorious path ! let us on, 
heeding not disappointment, difficulty, or depression. Man 
cannot deny us our privileges, cannot banish us from the 
heritage of the children of the Lord — for from everlasting will 
Israel endure. “ Thus saith the Lord, which giveth the sun 
for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and the stars 
for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves 
thereof roar — the Lord of Hosts is His name. If these ordi- 
nances depart from before me, saith the Lord, then the seed 
of Israel shall cease from being a nation before me for ever. 
Thus saith the Lord, If heaven above can be measured, and 
the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will cast 
off the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the 
Lord.” And if we are daughters and sisters, wives and mothers, 
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forward and proclaim the glory, and the mercy, and the wisdom, 
hud the love of Israel’s Almighty God ! 


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(I) 


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( 4 ) 


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( 5 ) 


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( 6 ) 


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( 8 ) 


NEW AND STANDARD FICTION ( continued ). 


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NEW AND STANDARD FICTION (continued). 


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( 10 ) 








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